Haunts

by Stephen Jones

  She hesitated only a beat. “Yes,” she said, still looking more amused than anything else. “Of course.”

  This time he led the way. It was the hottest part of the afternoon; but Gardiner was in the grip of a crazy adrenaline surge, and moved so quickly that Serafina was hard-pressed to match his speed.

  He entered the church first and switched on his flashlight, bracing himself for the worst. But what he saw were the scenes he had uncovered that morning. Benign golden-haloed saints, looking back at him with gazes of sappy medieval sanctity. Smiling dull-eyed shepherds stood amidst their patient sheep. Innocent dogs performed mindless leaps. He was limp with relief.

  Serafina, following him in, glanced around at the mosaics, and said, smiling, “Yes, well, so tell me: where are all these horrible things?”

  Gardiner peered at the walls, baffled.

  “I swear, Serafina, I was absolutely certain that they were there. A completely convincing hallucination, as real as—as real as these walls. The saints had turned into demons. The farm animals had become monsters. The colors—”

  She gave him a queer look. “You drank a whole bottle of wine with your lunch, yes? And slept in the sun. And then you dreamed. Ah, yes, yes, caro, a very bad dream. Which the oh-so-devilish ghosts of this place playfully put into your sleeping mind to perplex you. Look, look, there are no monsters here. It would be a good story if there were, but there are not. They are very pretty, your mosaics, I think.”

  Yes. Yes, they were. Gentle scenes, lovely, innocuous.

  Perplexed indeed, altogether lost in bewilderment, Gardiner said almost nothing while they trudged back to town. Already that panoply of monsters was becoming unreal to him. But what he could not put aside was his conviction that he had, at least for a moment, truly seen those things with his own sober eyes, though he knew, knew that it was impossible that he had.

  As they came up the path into the piazza Serafina said, “You should take the Greek priest over to see the church. He will find it a very exciting surprise.”

  “Who?”

  “Father Demetrios. He is Eastern Orthodox, of the Martorana church in Palermo. He is visiting here since yesterday.”

  Gardiner recalled, now, the other guest at the hotel, the black-bearded young priest of the night before.

  An Orthodox priest, though? The Greek rite? All thoughts of ghosts and monsters, and of his own possibly wobbling sanity, fled from Gardiner at once. He was seized by sudden overmastering practical fear. The priest, if he found out about the mosaics, would surely claim the derelict church on behalf of his sect and take control of any scholarly use of the art within it. Gardiner would be shut out, his rights of discovery overridden by the assertion of the higher right of prior ownership.

  “No,” he said. “I’d rather not show the mosaics to anybody just yet. You haven’t already told him about them, have you?”

  “No,” she said, “of course not.”

  Was she telling the truth? There was something almost petulant about that of course, and something ambivalent about the shake of the head.

  The town square was deserted. The villagers were still enjoying their siesta, the whole town torpid in the late-day heat. Serafina accompanied him as far as the porch of his inn, and lingered there a moment, long enough for him to wonder whether he should invite her upstairs. But even now, with no one to spy on them, it felt somehow inappropriate, even sordid, to make such an overture to her out of the blue. Their frantic jog over to the ruin had hardly been a proper romantic prelude, and his strange hallucination, his babbling account of imagining that he had witnessed a demonic transformation of the mosaics, left him feeling abashed and demeaned now. He offered no invitation.

  “Well, then, ciao, amico. I will be seeing you,” she added formally, and turned away.

  Was that a touch of disappointment in her tone? So it seemed to him, for a moment. But it was too late to call her back. Already, moving swiftly as always, she was halfway across the piazza.

  Gardiner went to his room, rinsed himself perfunctorily, unloaded his camera and buried the roll of film deep in his suitcase. For a long time he sat by his fly-specked window, staring into the square below, pondering many strangenesses. It was half past seven, now; the day was cooling, the townsfolk were coming forth for their pre-dinner stroll.

  Without warning, a desperate reckless desire to see the mosaics again, to confirm the reality of them, overcame him. He seized his camera and in a few minutes found himself once more laboring down the now-familiar path into the gorge.

  In the greyness of early evening he saw what he took to be bats flitting about the little domed church. Brushing impatiently past them, Gardiner marched inside, grim-faced, and cast his flashlight beam on the walls.

  The mosaics were in nightmare mode again. Everything was fangs, claws, tentacles, jutting swollen penises, jagged blurts of discordant color.

  He felt like sobbing. Why did the damned things keep oscillating in this maddening way? Why couldn’t they keep to one form or the other?

  “Serafina!” he howled, as if expecting her to be able to hear him across the canyon. “It’s happened again!”

  This time he had had no wine. The day’s heat had relented. He believed himself to be sane. What explanation could there be for this?

  There was none. He was staring into the abyss of the incomprehensible.

  Waves of nausea went sweeping through him. He was trembling, and his teeth were chattering, which was something he could not remember having experienced ever before, that convulsive spastic movement of his jaws, that terrible eerie clacking of his teeth. He steadied himself with an immense effort. This must be recorded, he thought. Yes. Yes. Aiming his camera at the ghastliest of the designs, Gardiner pressed and pressed again, but the flash attachment would not operate. He had no idea why. Fear gave way to rage. He spat, slapped the camera, pressed once more. Nothing. Fumblingly he took some photos by flashlight illumination alone, knowing they would never come out.

  He gave the things on the wall one long last hard look. Then he turned and ran from the building, struggling at every step through the tangled knots of brambles that blocked the path and were so much harder to see, this late in the day. He moved like a machine, never pausing. A void had taken possession of his mind; it was empty now of all thought, all speculation. He dared not even try to think.

  Darkness had fallen when he entered the town. His legs were aching mercilessly from the uphill run. His powerful thighs, of which he was so proud, the product of endless miles of dawn jogging, throbbed with pain. As he rounded the corner by the museum, a figure stepped out of the shadows and struck him a terrible blow in the stomach. His eyeglasses went flying. Astounded, Gardiner staggered back, doubling over, gagging and choking and reeling, though in some reflexive way he managed to put his fists up anyway to ward off another punch.

  It was Gino, Serafina’s cousin. He loomed over Gardiner, swollen with wrath, rocking from side to side as he prepared his next swing. His blue eyes were ablaze with rage. Gardiner slapped at the balled fist confronting him.

  “Hey, hold it,” he said. “I’ll give you back your goddamn boots, if that’s what you want.”

  “It is not the boots,” said Gino venomously, speaking remarkably precise Italian now. He swung again. Gardiner pivoted so that he took the punch on the meaty part of his left arm instead of in the middle of his chest. It went through him like a bolt of electricity.

  He could not remember when he had last been in a fistfight: not since he was twelve, most likely. But he was no weakling. He would fight back, if he had to. Automatically he dropped into a boxer’s crouch and weave, and when Gino swung again he ducked and threw a punch of his own, which Serafina’s cousin batted away with a contemptuous swipe, as though he were swatting at a mosquito. Gino’s next punch caught Gardiner just below his right clavicle, landing with thunderbolt force and sending him sprawling to the ground.

  Through a mist of pain and humiliation he became aware that
Serafina had emerged from somewhere and was pounding her fists furiously against Gino’s chest. “Pazzo!” she cried. “Cretino! Imbecile!”

  “Tell him I’m finished with his precious boots,” Gardiner muttered feebly.

  “The boots are not the issue,” she said, in English. “He is enraged because you have not slept with me. Because you have rejected me two nights twice.”

  Gardiner, still on the ground, gaped. “What the hell are you saying? I thought Sicilian men were supposed to defend the honor of their women, not to—”

  “It is because he thinks you think you are too good for me. He wants you to take me to bed, and then he will make you marry me, and you will settle a fortune on the entire family, because you are American and Americans are rich. In his mind it is my job to seduce you. In this, he believes, I have failed, and so he is angered.” Serafina extended her hand to Gardiner and pulled him to his feet. “Angered with you,” she said, “not me. Of me he is afraid.” She turned to Gino, standing to one side like a fettered ox, and unleashed on him a torrent of fiery Sicilian. Gardiner was unable to understand a word of it. When at last she fell silent, Gino went slinking wordlessly away into the night.

  “Come,” she said, picking up Gardiner’s glasses and handing them to him. Still befogged, he put them in his shirt pocket. “Are you badly hurt?”

  “Nothing broken. Only bent.”

  She led him into the albergo, pausing at the bar to pick up a bottle of grappa. Upstairs, in his room, she poured a drink for him, helped him get his backpack off, gently probed his chest and shoulders for damage. “You will live,” she said, and measured out some grappa for herself. “Gino is very stupid, but he means well. I apologize on his behalf.” Then, with a sly smile: “You are much more handsome without your glasses, Professore. A strong face, like a Roman emperor, hard, virile. All beveled planes and stony angles. The glasses destroy your face completely, do you know?” She was wearing a thin green cardigan and a flimsy purple skirt, and now she began to unbutton the cardigan. “You do not have to marry me, only to be nice,” she said. “You went to the mosaics again tonight?”

  “Yes.”

  “And?”

  “What I saw—it makes no sense, Serafina. They’d gone all strange again.” He felt abashed even to say such a thing. “I’m sorry. That’s how they were.”

  “The ghosts have you in their grip,” she said. “I am sorry for you for that. But come. Lie down with me. You want to, don’t you?” She was narrow through the hips and small-bottomed, not at all Italian that way, and her arms and shoulders were almost distressingly thin, but her breasts were agreeably full. They stayed in his room for two hours. The bed was too small for two, and creaked loudly enough to be heard all over town, but they coped, and coped well. In the close humid atmosphere of the little room Gardiner forgot entirely the pain of Gino’s punches and, in Serafina’s arms, even for a time succeeded in exorcising the nightmarish threat to his sense of his own sanity that his most recent visit to the ruined church had awakened in him.

  Afterward they went downstairs. The padrone and his wife appeared to have gone to sleep, but Serafina went into the kitchen of the trattoria and put together a dinner for the two of them out of whatever she could find there, some leftover pasta with anchovies and a cold shoulder of lamb and a platter of broiled tomatoes and garlicky mushrooms, along with what was left in several open bottles of wine. When they had eaten Gardiner asked her to go back up to his room with him again, but this time she declined with a polite smile, explaining it would not be wise for her to stay the night with him. “Until tomorrow,” she said. “And you should not go to the church again alone. Buona notte, cam.” Blew him a fingertip kiss and was gone.

  This has been a very weird day, Gardiner thought.

  *

  In the morning, as he was finishing breakfast, Serafina appeared at the albergo and said, “Let us make another visit to your mosaics. I still would like to see them, these horrors of yours.”

  “Most likely they’ll have changed back overnight,” Gardiner said, almost jauntily. “But let’s go anyway.” He realized that he was becoming obsessed by the improbability of all this: an encounter with the absurd, his very first. There was a certain charm to its very inexplicability, even. But behind the charm lay something truly scary that would not relinquish its hold on him: the terrifying possibility that the hinges of his mind had begun to loosen. It was either that or ghosts, and he had never been very successful at believing in ghosts.

  He was stiff and sore, not only from Gino’s onslaught but from all of yesterday’s running to and fro, and Serafina had to pause several times to wait for him to catch up as they crossed the valley. But at last they were at the church. “Let me go in first,” he said grandly, which brought the sly knowing smile from her once again. She waved him forward.

  He expected everything to be normal again, that they would see nothing more than gentle pastoral scenes. But no—no, almost with gratitude he saw that the walls of the chapel this morning were still full of terrifying hideosities. But they were different ones from last night’s. Today’s carnival of abominations featured savage, carnivorous things with rows of red glaring eyes; extraterrestrial-looking, spindly headed satyrs in full spate; pious pilgrims with melting slimy faces. Hieronymus Bosch on acid. He was surprised at how little dismay he felt. He was becoming almost resigned to these metamorphoses, he thought. The trick was not to search for explanations. “Take a look,” he called hoarsely to her. She came in and stood for a moment by his side as he shined his beam here and there and there. He heard her soft little gasp: plainly, she had not really expected to see the things that she was seeing here now. She slipped her arm through his and pressed close against him, shivering. When he attempted once more to take photographs, the flash attachment again refused to function.

  “This is the work of demons,” Serafina said, in a tone an octave deeper than normal. “Andiamo! Fuori!” They went swiftly outside. With a visibly shaky hand she crossed herself three times. All that ballsy cosmopolitan pizzazz had been stripped from her in an instant; she was a country girl again, and a terrified one. “You should tell Father Demetrios about this right away,” she said. Her eyes were wide rigid disks.

  “Why?”

  “This church formerly belonged to his faith. It is his responsibility to drive these things away.

  “To—drive them away—?”

  She was talking about an exorcism, this very modern young Sicilian woman. Gardiner stared. Moment by moment he could feel himself being drawn backward into the opaque, inscrutable medieval past.

  She said, as though explaining to a child, “You and I both saw saints and shepherds here yesterday afternoon, but in the morning and the evening, alone, you saw monsters. This morning, the monsters are still there, and now I see them too. So we are both hallucinating or else it is real, and I do not think we are hallucinating. It is easier for me to believe in demons than in shared hallucinations.”

  “I suppose.”

  “Look, strange things have occurred in this church for many years. Although not like this, not that I have ever heard. It is a serious thing, this deception in a place that once was holy. If nothing is done to cure it, who can say what harm might befall to others who come here?”

  “Let me think about all this a little.”

  “What is there to think?”

  The unreality of it all was overwhelming. But Gardiner struggled to keep things in a practical perspective. “I can’t predict what might happen to the mosaics once Father Demetrios knows about them. Suppose he insists on destroying them? I found them, Serafina. They’re important to me.”

  “This is my village, caro. It is important to me.”

  Gardiner had no answer for that. He had no answers for any of this.

  They returned to town in silence. Serafina grew perceptibly less tense the farther they got from the ruined church, as though they were returning not from a searing glimpse into the pit but only from some s
pooky horror film, and by the time they entered the village she was her familiar lively self again, whistling, joking, walking with easy, free strides. “We will go to see Father Demetrios now, all right?” she said. “He will be at the cathedral, with Father Giuseppe, I think. They are great friends, Father Demetrios and Father Giuseppe. Father Demetrios comes here every few months to play chess with him, and to argue doctrinal matters, whether the Holy Spirit proceeds from the Father alone or from the Father and the Son, and matters like that which will never be settled if they argue about them for ten million years.”

  “Does that mean Father Giuseppe will have to be told about the mosaics too?” Gardiner asked.

  “No. No. This matter is not the business of his church, only of the Greek Orthodox people. Let Father Demetrios handle it. If we tell Father Giuseppe, we will have the Pope here by next Tuesday, and the reporters and the television people, and everybody else. Look, here is Father Demetrios now.” She pointed across the piazza towards the pathetic little cathedral, the only badly designed one Gardiner had ever seen, a shallow-vaulted asymmetrical structure fashioned from rough-hewn blocks of dark stone ineptly fitted together. “He is very sexy, I think, Father Demetrios,” said Serafina slyly, giving Gardiner a playful nudge. “It is a great waste, a man like that in the priesthood. Come.” He was swept along in her wake, unable to protest.

  *

  Father Demetrios was garbed in black from head to toe, even now in the blowtorch blast of midday heat: cylindrical flat-topped black hat, long high-collared black robe sweeping down to shining black shoes. A heavy golden cross lay on his breast, its upper half vanishing into the dense coils of his long, thick, square-cut beard. He was about thirty-five, a handsome man, stocky and deep-chested, youthfully vigorous, with glossy, intelligent eyes buried in networks of little precocious wrinkles.

  ”The building has a bad history,” he said, speaking in passable English, over a cold bottle of white wine at the trattoria, when Gardiner had finished telling his tale. “I myself have never entered it. The mosaics, be they holy or otherwise, are a surprise to me. But the tradition is that a murder was done there, a priest struck down by a furious Norman knight. It was then deconsecrated. You will take me there now?”