Lizzi Bizzi and the Red Witch

by Stefano Pastor

«I knocked on all the doors, flat on the floor, I explained to everyone what had happened. Two men have decided to go down to see. I think they were Alberto and Mr. Cattaneo. Of course they have not come back again. Everyone was talking, shouting, and we could not decide what to do. It was dark, dark everywhere and we started to climb the upper floors. A couple refused to go up on the second floor. After a while, we heard screaming them too. And so, floor by floor we came to the top, to the sixth. There was only the roof».

  «And my husband, was he with you?»

  Mr Durante spoke more slowly, embarrassed.

  «Yes, of course. Right there, at least. But the wheelchair did not pass, the ladder for the roof was too tight. We offered to take him in the arm, but he insisted on staying. Without the wheelchair he felt lost».

  Guido was dead. This chilling certainty enveloped me, taking my breath away. I felt it clearly, indeed I was surprised that I did not understand it before. I knew it since I got home and saw the police in front of the door. I knew he was dead, but I had tried to deceive me. I wanted to weep but I could not, I wanted to scream but I did not voice any more.

  «So, we got up on the roof».

  Andrei interrupted him.

  «Is it possible that none of you have come to look out for a window and cry out for help?».

  «But there was nothing, nothing outside of us. Outside it was dark, very dark. There was no trace of life. Just looking at those black glasses dreaded. None of us had the courage to approach, let alone touch them».

  Andrei was astonished: what the man was saying was absurd, he had no sense.

  «On the roof all happened in a moment. I do not know how to explain it. There was no time to do anything, even to think. Those who tried to reach the edges were the first. Everyone ran, yelling. I did not resist, I was terrified, locked in the closet, and I plugged all the holes with a rag, as the Chinese had told me. I locked the door with the sticks. Outside they stopped shouting almost immediately. Then the door began to shake. I thought it was over for me too. Instead it worked and left».

  «Who?».

  «I do not know, I do not know, I have no idea. I have not seen anything. I tried not to see, I even taped the window to not be seen. I do not know what happened out there. I only remember the screams, I will never forget them»

  Andrei could not believe it.

  «Is absurd! A roof full of people screaming and nobody noticed anything!»

  Almost I did not recognize my voice: how calm and cold it was, determined. What was happening to me?

  «This house is taller than the others. Look around: they are all houses of three, four floors at most. And then it was the peak time, the streets full of traffic. Look, though, even if you pretend to scream, it’s hard to hear it from this height».

  «And the nonsense on the glasses? Do you have an explanation for this too?».

  «No, I have no idea»

  Andrei weighed the situation.

  «We go down. All we have to do is look at the cellar».

  Mr. Durante started screaming again.

  «Not you, of course. I’ll take you to the hospital».

  «With the helicopter?».

  «Please, be silent. You go down with us!».

  The man kept whining, but he let the cops carry him with them, in front of the stairs they were forced to lift him.

  The most terrible time was when I had to pass next to Guido’s wheelchair. I forced myself to look at it. All my fears, my anguish, my sorrow, strengthened my hate, that deadly mixture of ice and fire that supported me. A ruthless, monstrous hate, which I never dreamed of being able to test, against anyone who had accomplished those horrors. It was this to keep me alive and I was looking for any pretext to feed it.

  Andrei was at my side and never left me. He looked at me with fear, trying to interpret my feelings, for his good fortune without being able to do it completely. The descent was a nightmare: none of us had the courage to enter the elevator and the stairs seemed endless. From floor to floor, the silent and abandoned house looked more like a tomb. The policemen, agitated, branded weapons with excessive zeal. Andrei, with a barely audible voice, confided to me his fear that someone get on his nerves-it would have been a hassle for us all.

  Eventually, after an endless time, we came to the ground floor. The exit was there, in front of us. Through the glasses we could see the guard policemen who smiled and raised us. Andrei turned to Spini.

  «Get out of that poor guy and bring him to the hospital. I recommend, do not talk to anyone. Journalists need nothing to know. At least until we find out what happened».

  Then he pointed to me.

  «Take out Mrs. Landi and take care of her. Do not let them assault her»

  Mr. Durante was happy to leave, he was already starting out at the exit without any need to be supported. I did not mean to move one step further.

  «Not at all! I come down with you. There might be my husband down there».

  I read the answer in Andrei’s eyes: «That’s it», he thought. For this reason he was unmovable.

  I was dragged out against my will. Wherever curious or worried faces were looking at me. What did I do there? I had to be downstairs, along with the others. A cop brought me a chair and I fell on it. I was so tired, exhausted. And they were coming down… it was as if I heard them, step by step, they were meeting… to what? What was waiting for them, down there? Probably nothing: it would have been all empty and lindy and ordered as on the roof and in the rest of the house. They were all gone, as if they had never existed. The nothing had swallowed them. How could you hope to find a logical and rational explanation of what had happened?

  Two policemen struggled hard to keep the curious, but for me it was as if they did not even exist. I stood there, motionless, with a fixed look, emptied of everything. Mr. Durante was shouting and Mr. Spini had been forced to drag him up to the ambulance. The survivor swirled, warning the present against the dangers of the damned house. Everywhere the confusion reigned.

  Then the youngest policeman ran out of the house, panting.

  «Torches, we need torches. It’s all dark down there, we don’t see nothing…»

  New confusion, the cops dispersed in search of what they had been asked for. Almost immediately an agent came running.

  «I only found this one».

  «Better than nothing».

  The young policeman catch it and went back to the house in a hurry.

  There was another one.

  «I found this too!».

  I did not think but acted as an impulse

  «Give it to me, I give it to him».

  And I pulled it out of his hand.

  I was not doing the right thing, I was aware of it, I had taken him by surprise and my presence could have been an obstacle to Andrei and to his men. I had taken advantage of an emergency situation to impose myself, disregarding the problems I could generate. But, at the moment, it did not bother me at all. I had a task, an enemy to destroy, and nothing else was important. Nothing.

  At the door of the cellar I was waiting for a second, stunned by the unnatural silence that enveloped me.

  It was overwhelming: below there was something, something that sounded. Crunches, suckles, just as mentioned, seemingly distant and so floppy enough to doubt my hearing. But there, in that absolute silence that surrounded me, they grew to look like boats. I realized that it was probably house noises, water flowing through the pipes, perhaps just the boiler that had to be somewhere down there, but I was not comforted by it. The voice of reason could not calm down much. The noises remained, and they did not give any good news.

  Someone had come out of there and had taken away all the inhabitants of the house. Probably had already gone, but how did you not feel terror in that place? I was nearing the collapse when I heard the steps coming down the stairs. The ray of a flashlight illuminated the entrance and I heard a policeman launch a sigh of relief. Their companion came down the stairs. In one hand he had the torch, the
other in the gun.

  I hurried to follow him: the ladder was lost in the dark. Even this was narrow and steep like the one on the roof, and here too the bulbs were broken.

  I heard Andrei’s annoyed voice.

  «You have just brought a torch, what kind of morons! What about a flashlight? We’re in six!».

  «Seven!».

  I walked so that he could see myself.

  «We’ve only found these two, we’ll have to do enough», I said.

  The young policeman smiled embarrassed in front of Andrei’s gaze.

  «I did not notice», he tried to apologize.

  «Where was that fool Spini? He had to deal with her».

  I was answering him.

  «He was forced to accompany Mr. Durante with the ambulance. The journalists had even besieged it. It was not prudent to leave it alone».

  Andrei opened his mouth to counteract, then realized that it would have been useless. Now I was there and we had to move on. It had been my choice, and I knew what we were likely to find there. Andrei had to accept the fact that, if I considered myself able to withstand it, maybe I was really.

  I gave my torch to Andrei, who immediately illuminated the cellar. It was a large, mackerel. At a couple of feet from us there was the electric panel. Andrei motioned to the other policeman with the torch to go see.

  «Go check it out. We cover your shoulders»

  The man struggled to repress a rejection, then he started. He wandered the wall, illuminating the floor in front of him, then reached the plant. He slid the light beam over cables and switches, then gave a whistle.

  «Damn it, but here we risk to jump all over. There is a collapse here, just on the current cable. It was sliced, that’s why light has missed. Then there must have been another collapse, and the cable fell on the lead, next to the other segment. The two cables have touched and made contact. The current is back. What a fatality». Right at that moment, sparks sparked from the cables, causing the policeman to retreat. «Fuck, you’re risking being stuck!».

  The man instinctively took a step back. I saw him shuffle. The ray of his lamp zigzagged along the walls as he tried to regain the balance. He could not and rushed with a shout, disappearing into the dark. The light of the torch, as it fell, illuminated the edges of that absurd black hole that covered almost entirely the cellar floor. Incredible that we did not notice before. The policeman had to walk right on his edge, entering, and only a miracle had saved him from falling before. His terrified scream, which continued, showed how deep that gap was.

  We came to his aid, knowing that we could hardly save him. Andrei tried to make light, but the torch could not do miracles; the dark swallowed the light beam after a few meters. Probably the pit was at least one hundred feet deep, maybe more. How could such a well exist in the center of the city, just below my home?

  Then I realized that the walls of the well moved, pulsating. The light created strange shadows, as if in the depths something was moving, invisible, along the walls. Several things, in fact, fled when the light came to lick them. The agent shouted still, far away, then suddenly stopped and the silence returned.

  How did we not realize that the entire plan had collapsed? What now seemed like a big local, until a few hours before it had been divided into so many small rooms that served as condominium cellars and certainly there was a boiler room.

  Now, everything was sinking, swallowed by vice. Illuminating the roof, they could see the points where the walls that had collapsed joined the ceiling, drawing the map of the rooms. Of those that had been walls only a few fragments, in precarious equilibrium.

  By five and a half of that afternoon, that sinkhole had been opened, which had swallowed up the entire cellar and interrupted the supply of electric light. It was a miracle that the house had resisted such a plague without collapsing. And how could it have happened so silently that it did not alarm the tenants? Then what happened?

  We were all there and spotted the tangle behind Andrei’s shoulders.

  An agent made an exclamation.

  «My God, what is that?».

  We all watched, scared.

  Something was going up from the bottom of the well. Andrei tried to illuminate it: it seemed like a liquid-like fluid was filling the well. As we approached, we noticed a different density: it looked like a whitish, semi-transparent jelly. The agent, having fallen, should have caused that reaction. By now it was about ten feet from the board.

  «Come on, soon! Let’s get out of here!».

  At the edge of Andrei we all drove to the exit. They let me go first, the ladder was too tight, you could only climb in Indian row.

  I climbed up, unable to look away from the dam pit, screeching in my steps. I saw that unclean liquid overflowing from the well and invade the cellar. Andrei and the agent who went up lastly screamed for me to run. I turned one last time to see the jelly hit the electric board. There was an explosion of sparks, the plastic form retracted and the cable came off.

  Suddenly, the door panel became dark: the current was again missing. We were trying to climb as fast as possible. We were just a step away from the just-mentioned door pattern when the agent behind Andrei started screaming. Andrei reached out to grab it, but there was nothing left.

  The scream was moving away, descending toward the cellar. In the attempt, Andrei had lost the torch, now we were all completely in the dark. Andrei leapt up and passed the door. A policeman hurried to close. I struggled hard not to burst into hysterical laughter. That poor man really believed that a closed door could have stopped that thing? The exit was there, a few feet away from us.

  Two glass doors separated us from freedom. Andrei grabbed me by an arm.

  «The stairs soon up the stairs».

  I obeyed, immediately. The senior agent followed us. The two younger policemen kept an uncertain time, then they went to the exit.

  «You are crazy, you will not, it’s too fast».

  But the cops did not listen to Andrei’s screams. They threw themselves against the glass door that opened with violence. The winery door jumped with a dry crash and flew away, finishing against the wall in front. As a flood, the liquid invaded the ground floor, leaping the steps where Andrei’s feet were just before, spurted with the fierceness of a river full of enthusiasm. It developed the agents’ legs just a meter before they reached the exit, and freedom. The men slipped, an agent ran over the glass of the door, stunned.

  Inside, police officers watched impotent: they saw the gelatin completely submerged their colleague who was asking for help, filling the entrance completely. The cops were floating in that substance, still alive, and they fought furiously, trying to scream, but they did not emit any sound. Then, with a terrifying slowness, they began to be sucked inward. As they moved away from the door, they disappeared into the sight of those looking from the outside, pointing out that the substance was much denser than it had at first sight.

  A policeman stretched out his hand as if to open it, but retreated in time. The substance had lined the door even outside a solid and almost transparent film. It was expanding and rising up, covering the wall like a glove. The agents turned away scared from the house.

  Andrei forced me to look away from that horrible scene that had me hypnotized and continued to drag me up the stairs, as fast as possible, opposed by the implacable darkness that enveloped us. Terror had frozen us, we did not even dare to speak, and moreover, what could we have been able to say? Now I knew what had happened to the people of the house, what those poor people had to experience and I was aware of the low probability of salvation.

  I saw Guido into his wheelchair, while that horrible fluid ran to him, wrapped it around and snatched it away. I could hear his silent scream in my mind.

  We went to the first floor. We felt that the thing was following us, it was next to us and moving it caused a noise like a drowning.

  Then we were at the second, then at the third. I was the first to talk.

  «What’s the purpo
se of going to the roof? Well, it’ll still reach us!».

  «So then? Should we stop, wait for it?»

  «We can try the Chinese system. Maybe we’ll be more fortunate, Mr. Durante has done it!».

  Andrei blushed the proposal. The Chinese hadn’t done quite well, what else could we do?

  «You can try».

  «In my house, in my apartment. I know him well, I can move there in my eyes closed».

  We climbed up to the fourth floor and there I was leading them into the darkness to the door of my home, which fortunately we had left open. As the cops closed the door, I tried to tinkle the cover and cut it apart, then I pulled the curtains off to get more pieces. The room was lit by the moonlight. Approaching the glasses, I could see the crowd down there and the lights of the city.

  Consciousness came to me as a stab.

  «My God we are lost. We’ve got everything wrong and now we’re trapped!»

  Andrei and the other agent were barricading the door with all the furniture they could find. They did not stop, despite my words.

  «What does it mean?».

  «Windows! There were no windows to open in Mr. Durante’s locker room, so he saved! Only that poor porthole sealed!».

  «But in the Chinese house it did not come through the windows, it broke the door!».

  «Yes, of course, but only because it knew they were there. From the windows it knew they were there».

  «You will not believe that thing can see us!».

  «No, do not see us, but feel our smell!».

  «We have to plug the window slots, then».

  «We do not have the time! In this apartment there are eight windows and a door that gives onto the balcony. It would be an eternity».

  «For God’s sake, what should we do?».

  «Come».

  I run in the bedroom, followed by the two men. I opened the window and went out onto the balcony. We immediately heard the screams down the street: they had noticed us, despite the darkness.

  «Look, there, right after the balcony, there is a firefighting scale. Knew how many times we have to each other complained and asked it to be taken away! Anyone could go undisturbed. We were forced to keep the balcony closed even in the summer for fear of thieves. Now I thank heaven that they have not listened to me!».