When they become starship fighters laser-beaming each other across and under the table while arguing about who gets to be the alien craft, their father stands up and says with a firm voice, “Okay, kids, now bedtime for real.”
“No, no, we want to wait for the ghosts!”
Angela turns around raising a finger and laughing, “They’re not ghosts, I told you!”
“We want to see them anyway!”
Berto crosses his arms on his chest. “No way, youngsters, they come very, very late at night. Now, come with me and I’ll tell you a story.”
“The one with the dogs and frogs!” the boy says, while his sister is screaming, “Not the one with the dogs and frogs!”
“Double-time, troops, with me!”
Bickering, the children follow Berto out of the kitchen and up the stony stairs, leaving the women alone.
* * *
Silence, broken by the popping of logs in the fireplace, pages of Teresa’s old book turning, and the humming of the dishwasher.
While handwashing a large wooden spoon encrusted with Bitto cheese, Angela casts a quick look over her shoulder to her mother, then, without turning, casually says, “They asked about you down in town at Mass this morning.”
“Mmm-hmm.”
“It was a good sermon, you know? The Don was in one of his up days, talked about accepting death being the ultimate act of faith in Jesus, and…”
“Mmm-hmm.”
“Mum, you could come at least these holy days.”
“I don’t care.”
“The kids asked why you didn’t come to the graveyard this morning, if you’re coming tomorrow. What am I supposed to say to them?”
“You’re the mother. You choose.”
Angela dries her open hands in her apron, turning to look at her with rebuke. “Mum, come on, it’s been thirty years.” She glances at a framed photograph on a wall: a black-and-white, younger Teresa is there with an escort of four children, standing at a sort of military attention. They have their good-day dresses on, laces and crochets. Despite the young age, the smaller of the two girls has Angela’s big eyes and smile on her face, so that she really cannot be mistaken. The sixth figure in the picture is a handsome, square-shouldered and square-faced man with eyes black like his beard. He smiles broadly enveloping the two males in his strong arm, while Teresa is dead serious in the image. “Are you still angry with him?”
“You bet I am.”
“He made a mistake, Mum…”
“He got drunk by mistake? Got drunk and went out hunting and fell in a gully and left me to raise four children alone? Mistake, you call it. That’s interesting.”
Angela does not answer; she takes the unmarked bottle of red wine on the kitchen counter and, as she removes the cork, a trace escapes, smelling like the end of summer. She pours a glass for herself and, while she moves to the window, she changes the subject, “By the way, know who I saw at the graveyard?”
“Dead people, I guess.”
While Angela’s lips sip the wine, her eyes are on the glaring moon sliding up from behind the mountain ridge, beneath towering clouds rising with a fluorescent grey glow. From the flattened summit, the ridge abandons gold-washed meadows, toward the black beech wood that spreads down until it meets the treeline at the edge of their garden. On both sides of the ridge, the woods plunge down to gloomy valleys – sparse lights on the Bergamo face outlining the trees, on the Lecco face a solid wall of blackness reaching up to gigantic waves against the ultramarine slice of the lower sky, and then turning abruptly into fearsome limestone fangs.
Theirs is the last house of a hamlet nesting in a narrow saddle of the ridge: a line of about twenty buildings of large stones, fused together in two ranks flanking a winding cobbled street two-people wide. On one end of the street, a pitted, one-lane asphalt road ending in a slight widening now hosting two pickups and a four-wheel drive FIAT Panda; on the other, it loses itself in a trail. Only three of the buildings have their lights on, some of the others abandoned to their apparent ruin.
“La Filomena,” she mutters, almost lost in thought, without taking her eyes away from the view.
A snorting sound from her mother is the only comment.
“You won’t believe it, but I talked her into giving me a piece of her starter dough! I used it for the bones of the dead,” she nods toward the cookies on the table.
“That one is a stria,” grumbles Teresa. “Had I known, I wouldn’t have touched the blasted things. And you shouldn’t have either.”
Angela turns around to look at her, and laughs heartily. “Perhaps she’s a witch – she certainly looks like one, a bit. But sure as hell her starter dough is outstanding, and the cookies quite proved it.”
Teresa does not remark further. She ponderously closes the book with a whiff and thud, and straightens up, a slow and slightly stiff, but powerful movement. She is smaller than her daughter, who is tall and large-boned, but despite a slightly rigid stance the older woman looks sinewy and energetic. She lays the book on the carved mantelpiece and slowly steps, with a bobbing gait, to the stony staircase.
“Already going to bed?”
“Got some work to do in the garden early in the morning.”
“But tomorrow is the Day of the Dead!”
She snorts and goes up the stairs.
* * *
A sudden, stifled crash from downstairs.
Angela is straddling Berto as she starts and half-turns, apparently mistreating him someway where it hurts, judging from the expression on his flushed face. She has turned right, to face the closed door, covering her generous motherly breasts with the linen as though someone had suddenly appeared at the threshold.
“What’s the matter?” he asks, catching his breath, pain evaporating from his face yearning for more action.
“Didn’t you hear?”
“What?”
“Downstairs, something broke.”
“I didn’t hear anything, honey.” He reaches out with his hands to seek her breasts under the linen. “Come on, let’s –”
She grabs his hands and takes them away, holding them. “I’m sure, Berto. I think it was a dish.”
Berto grins. “Oh, I see. Must have been the kids, out looking for ghosts. They must have dropped the dish with the bones of the dead. Let’s just pretend we don’t know, okay?”
She shakes her head. “Could be them. But I’m going to check anyway. Maybe they cut themselves.”
And with a smooth movement she is on her feet, her strong body glistening with sweat in the moonlight. She throws a nightgown on and her hand is already on the door handle when the resigned Berto sighs, “Wait. I’m coming too.”
As he puts on his pajama pants, she says, “We should have gone down anyway to make the cookies disappear, unless you want to see some very disappointed little faces tomorrow morning.”
“Yep, I know. I just hoped we’d go a little later…”
As they pad along the corridor, they can’t help but make the old wooden planks creak a little. Angela leans her head in the children’s room, just a couple of seconds, then retreats, looking at her husband with a frown. “They’re both sleeping. Soundly.”
Berto spreads his arms, raising his eyebrows and smiling. “So there’s nothing to –” Then his face stiffens as he reads her expression. “Are you sure you heard the noise?”
“Positive.”
“Then it’s probably a mouse, but still, stay back,” he says resolutely, and begins stealthily descending the stairs with a compressed-spring look to all his wiry muscles. She follows two steps behind him, in an almost complete silence.
As Berto appears in the kitchen doorway, his fists raised and closed, he opens his mouth and just stays there like that.
Angela is still on the last step, her partial view of the kitchen is blotted ou
t by her statuary husband. But it is way too cold, the air so dense and clashing with contrasting odors – the scent of flowers, irises, like the head of a newborn; and an acrid stench, hardly identifiable. She lunges forward to shake him and look inside, whispering hard, “What?”
And then she sees the ghost.
It is crouching, furiously lapping cookie crumbs with its black tongue from the ground littered with shattered ceramic. It does not seem to have noticed them yet. It has no hint of colors in the silvery moonlight and in the gentle, wavering blaze of the candle for the dead, just the milky white of his naked skin – the last layer of which looks like greased plastic wrap – and the deep black of the tongue and an oily smoke swirling slowly around its black-lipped mouth and head, filling in parts of its chest that seems to fade out of existence, dissolving where other parts materialize, or maybe solidifying into them.
It turns its head and looks at them with deep wells bursting with black fire.
A piercing, hissing snarl, like ground metal, pours out of its gaping mouth. And it moves toward them half-crawling and half-skittering on all fours, one of its legs and one of its arms bent at wrong angles as all its limbs seem to be animated in stop motion. Nevertheless, it is quick.
Angela screams and shakes Berto and tugs him back a few clumsy steps with her, through the small hall and into the dinette, where they stumble backward and trip, with Angela landing on her back, having the wind knocked out of her as Berto falls hard upon her.
Everything spins for a moment, and when the world comes back it is filled with the screaming face of the ghost – features indiscernible, like an overexposed photo, its stink of rank milk and burnt rubber and stale alcohol washing over Angela like a clammy fluid.
Berto has rolled away from her, putting his arm across her chest to shield her as best he can. She crawls back but there is just the large solid-wood credenza there.
The ghost reaches out with its tattered hands and then there is a chill around their necks – a sad, burning cold, together with a deep sense of desiccation and atrocious pins-and-needles, spreading fast.
The objects around blur and the air becomes sharp and heavy and darkness fills the edges of sight, creeping in.
A sudden, loud clatter.
The ghost’s head swirls back one hundred and eighty degrees as some light returns at once. The cutting pain becomes numb and dull, swelling quickly.
Teresa is on the doorless threshold of the illuminated hall, slamming two pans together and looking at the ghost fiercely. “Leave them alone, shitface.”
Sluggishly, the ghost crawls backward, its head looking toward Teresa while its body still faces the couple. Its body parts are moving out of sync: head, spine, and belly seem more solid than the rest, more three-dimensional, but also more static.
Teresa’s voice is steady, addressing her daughter and son-in-law without looking at them, her eyes fixed on the creeping figure that still seems to hesitate between targets. “Grab the kids and go. Walk until sunrise, don’t stop. Don’t call anyone, don’t seek help – no one can help. Hell, no one could even see him.” A bewildered look from her daughter. Clang. “Don’t you get it? We ate the bones of the dead!”
The ghost partially straightens up and turns the rest of itself toward Teresa. Angela and Berto, staggering, help each other up, holding their necks with their hands, their asthmatic breaths whistling. Angela’s voice is a scraping wheeze, “But – Mum!”
The ghost stops and, its head spinning backward at once, begins to crawl again toward Angela and Berto. Another, louder clank of pans, causes it to shiver as if an electrical current had run through it.
Teresa snarls, “Here, shitface!”
She slams her pans together again. The ghost moves resolutely in her direction.
“Obey, Angela! I can deal with this one,” she orders, and in the following instant has swiveled around and is hurrying to the door, the ghost disjointedly darting in her wake.
* * *
The garden. Bright moonlight glazing greens, crystallizing the air saturated with minuscule waterdrops.
The ghost has almost reached Teresa, who is crouching – out of breath? tripped? – between a patch of cauliflower and one of chards in clay soil, squishy and slightly muddy from the impalpable drizzle.
As the ghost lunges forward, arms stretching ahead and talons eager to squeeze, she straightens up and spins around in one fluid movement, a large-bladed, thick-handled spade raised above her, eclipsing the moon for a fraction of a second, then plunging down hard with a dull whistle of ploughed air and connecting with the incoming forehead of the ghost.
It makes no sound as it meets miry resistance.
It sinks in, splitting the head half the width of the iron, black oil erupting out. And the ghost drops.
Teresa’s chest heaves with a hiss as she steps ahead, looking at the body from above.
It is twitching. Teresa lays her foot on the upper edge of the rusty, pointy flat blade and pushes it down through its head. The ghost stops moving.
As she pants and flinches, reaching back with a hand to massage her back, the thick and pasty oil grows tendrils that slither around the blade.
Smoke. Sizzling.
Teresa starts and jerks back, pulling out the spade and almost losing her balance as she slides on the slippery ground, her eyes widening at the frying lump on the ground which is becoming a head again.
It begins to scuttle toward her even before the head is complete, fumbling with its arms, seeking her ankles.
The spade comes down again, sinking into the head and nailing it to the ground.
She talks in strict dialect now, “What did you think, that I didn’t recognize you, shitface? I’d smell you anywhere.”
He comes in together with a tang of alcohol sweat, shouting, “I’m hungry!”
She is mending a pair of trousers, stooping on her work on the sewing machine, its ticking the only sound in the kitchen. She stands up now, grabs him by a shoulder as he stumbles into the edge of the table with a piercing creak on the cotto floor.
“Shush! I’ve just managed to put little Angela to bed!”
He looks at her hand on him like it were something alien. Then slowly drags up his dark eyes to glower at her. “Don’t you talk to me like that.”
The ghost screeches. The spade slams down.
“I can do it as many times as it takes.”
It sinks in.
The slap is almost instantaneous, he does not even seem to have moved.
She spins a half-turn and grabs the edge of the stove so as not to fall as the room is suddenly rocking around. Taste of blood.
Another time. The ghost’s head splits open.
“How many times have you smacked me, you drunk shit? It made you feel like a real man, did it, shitface?”
As he steps toward her with a satisfied look on his ruddy face, she straightens up – her own face half-reddened, twitching with wild surges of emotion – and pushes him away with both hands, hard.
He trips on his own feet, fumbling ridiculously for purchase and finding none, then falls back on his buttocks with a loud thud.
She laughs bitterly, “Look at you. You’re pathetic.”
He gets up slowly, threateningly slowly, with a dark light in his eyes.
The black oil sizzles, the spade escapes its clammy tentacles.
She holds up her hands as he approaches, but he is upon her, his fist pulled back to his shoulder, then jabs out at once.
It hits her in the eye.
She is sent back to slam into the cast-iron stove, rebounding down to the floor, moaning, coughing up blood, quivering.
Little Angie stands on the last step of the stairs, frozen, her Teddy Bear dangling at her side while she holds its paw. From her angle, she can just see her mother on the ground. Her eyes are full of tears. “Nooo, Mum
my, you’re hurt!”
Vertigo. Black flash.
Teresa staggers, a stab in her back, discharging pain. She groans as she renews her purchase on the ashwood handle with bleeding hands, propping herself on it to stay on her feet.
One of the hands of the ghost has taken advantage of her moment of crisis, and it has spidered onto her slipper.
Teresa’s voice is a harsh gargle, “It’s all right, dear, go upstairs. Mummy’s just tripped.”
Her father leans on the doorway, a wide grin on his face. “Heard your mother? Go upstairs. I’ll take care of her.”
As the little girl begrudgingly obeys, Teresa pushes on her trembling arms, raising her head, half of her face a throbbing violet bump.
“You coward shitface.”
His face is on fire.
He stalks toward her, but she leaps onto her feet and ducks, dodging his flailing arms. He takes hold of a lock of hair and she shrieks, her head pulled back.
The hand clutches her ankle.
She moans in pain, trying without success to pull the leg away.
She swirls the spade and strikes at the wrist, severing half of it from the still-squeezing hand. A stream of oil squirts onto her leg, frying skin. She yowls and then hits again, detaching the hand entirely and jerking it away from the rest of the body. It stops squeezing at once, dropping on the dirt, leaving its print on her mud-smudged ankle – the touched skin looks like coal sprinkled with ash.
She stamps on his toes and with a choked cry his fingers slide out, a bunch of torn hair is all they got as Teresa reaches the door and runs out to the garden.
He stomps fast behind her, whispering curses in the starlit night.
She vanishes into the wooden toolshed.
He laughs as he slows down, a victorious grin settling on his face, “Think I didn’t see you? Now you’re like a trapped mouse in there.” He cracks his fingers. “And it’s time you learn your lesson.”
The ghost has scrambled on all fours and is lunging at her; she is about to lose her balance as soon as she puts weight on the damaged leg. He leaps, his intact hand reaching toward her, his mouth gaping like a black hole. She deliberately drops on the ground and the ghost vaults over her, brushing her without managing to grab her and tumbling over. She turns and, knees set in the soft clay, hammers the spade down on the nape of his neck.
Supernatural Horror Short Stories Page 4