The Mammoth Book of Nightmare Stories Read online

  But Grisson’s iron hand was on my shoulder, his voice reassuring in my ears as he half-dragged, half-carried me through the heat and rotted vegetation into the sane quietude of the green trees and undergrowth that fringed the wall. I waited until we had regained the Duke’s garden and a secluded corner of the lakeside, before I began to retch and collapse.

  II

  IT WAS QUITE an hour before I was myself again. Grisson was all solicitude. He brushed away a servant who came to inquire too pressingly after us, bathed my forehead in icy water from a fountain, and, gradually, I regained my senses. We eventually found ourselves back in the presence of an alarmed Duke. Grisson was, of course, all apologies, but he had asked me to make light of the affair to our host, who speedily produced a stiff whiskey and begged us to stay to dinner.

  “It will not be dark until very late, and you will be able to get well clear during daylight,” he said, with an emphasis that revealed he knew all too clearly what was the matter.

  As for Grisson, he soon plunged himself into further study of the massive books in the Duke’s library, and that gentleman himself, though obviously concerned, did not press any inquiries regarding our experiences.

  “A touch of the sun and nerves,” was Grisson’s own explanation to the Duke and the servants, and by sotto voce comments and gestures he asked me particularly not to say anything to the guide.

  As for myself, youth and a good dinner rapidly restored my spirits, and as the wine went round, I even began to wonder whether I had not, in fact, dreamed my experiences. As the aftertaste of the adventure began to fade away, I became ashamed of my panic on the bluff where the statues stood, and even hoped that Grisson himself would not refer to it.

  It was past eight in the evening and the light was still bright in the western sky when Grisson and I, after many thanks and repeated goodbyes to the courteous Duke, made our way once again past the lake and through the valley. My last glimpse was of the statues, high on their plateau brooding over the bluff; but the sunset tinged the whole place with such beauty and melancholy that even then I said nothing and thought—fool that I was—that the group even looked beautiful against the sky, ablaze with greens and blues, reds and golds.

  Grisson made only one more direct reference to the episode when he spoke shortly of the celebrated “mirage effect” which, combined with vertigo, had brought on my attack, as he called it. I said nothing further, but later came a little incident which led me to believe that Grisson had not played fair over my ordeal. But he made handsome amends eventually, though I had to wait over three years for the explanation.

  We were fairly on our way back to the village, and the light was still strong enough to see clearly, when Grisson drew some papers out of his pocket to consult them. We were walking abreast, and something brushed against my arm and fell onto the white dust of the path. It had evidently been carried from Grisson’s pocket with the documents.

  My first instinct was to draw his attention to it, but something held me back. Instead, on pretence of tying my shoelace, I dropped behind and picked up the small object. It was unidentifiable to my immediate glance, and did not appear to be of any value.

  However, I said nothing and placed it carefully in my pocket, stuffing down my handkerchief on top of it. Later that night, back in a well-lit hotel room and my adventure receding into limbo, I picked up the small, round object and examined it carefully under the glare of a table-lamp. It took me some while to identify it and then, afterward, when I had thought things over, I did not sleep so well. The article Grisson had dropped appeared to be, so far as I could make out, one of a pair of rubber earplugs.

  III

  SOME YEARS LATER, as I indicated earlier, I met Grisson again; this time, fortunately, under less frightening circumstances. I had maintained correspondence with him, on and off, in the interim, and though neither of us had made reference to our extraordinary adventure, the question marks it had raised in my mind seemed to hang cloudily between the lines of the occasional letters we exchanged. So something in a letter he wrote me long afterward raised my expectations, and I was not disappointed in the sequel.

  I had run into Grisson one afternoon of a hot July, when I was shopping on the Canebière in Marseilles. I had only half-an-hour or so to get to St. Charles to catch my train on to Nice, but we exchanged addresses and he promised to write. I thought little more of it until a letter, heavily stamped and addressed and readdressed in multi-colored inks, reached me some ten days and three hotels later in Genoa.

  Grisson was in Florence, attending some sort of congress of museum curators. He knew I intended to visit there. He had a friend, Arthur Jordan, he would like me to meet. Would I join them for a day or two? They were sharing a villa. There was room for me, and I would not have to put up with their company for too long, as they had to attend morning and afternoon sessions of the congress and would only be able to see me in the late afternoons.

  The idea was attractive, but what decided me was a curious postscript, which Grisson had heavily underlined, not once, but three times: Please come. Most important. Jordan has the Sicilian explanation. The last two words were again underscored.

  To say that I was interested would be an understatement. Genoa was palling in the heat, despite the breeze off the sea, and I knew no one in the city. I telegraphed the same afternoon, made an inquiry about trains, and little more than two days later was comfortably settled in at a small but delightful villa in the hills outside Florence.

  I had haunted the Uffizi, duly admired once again the incomparable cathedral, and it was not until the second night of my stay that Grisson had broached the subject which had brought me to the city. A moon like an orange was pasted to the hilly backcloth as we passed through the square, past the massive portals then thought to be bronze, now known to be gold, and my companions selected a pavement café not far from the Ponte Vecchio.

  There is nothing like a summer evening in Florence, with its scent of flowers and all the atmosphere of a Tuscan night, with a thousand years of history pressing on one, for a story. But such a story as I heard then made me feel doubly glad that I was in such delightful surroundings, with the reassuring river sounds of the Arno only a few yards distant from my comfortable cane chair.

  I had come to like Arthur Jordan immensely, in the few hours I had known him. Still young—in his late forties, I believe—with prematurely white hair crowning a boyish face, the most predominant feature being square white teeth which flashed attractively into a smile, startling in the dark brown of his face. He was a born adventurer.

  He too, like Grisson, was a curator. Not of a famous museum like his companion, but I gathered that his duties left him time in the summer months for a number of roving commissions, in which he not only brought himself up-to-date on the more important Continental collections, but from time to time had been responsible for staging unusual exhibitions of statuary, pottery, and mediaeval glass of many ages and periods, in halls, galleries, and museums in Paris and London.

  It was on such an errand that he had gone to Sicily, and to the scene of our startling adventure, a year or two before. He was hunting this time principally for statuary and sculpture of the seventeenth century, mostly from gardens and parks, to be exhibited on loan, as part of a gigantic presentation of the art of that period in London.

  As he spoke, I gained something of his enthusiasm and remembered reading newspaper reports of that time. The exhibition had been unusual in that it represented complete rooms, looking on to “gardens” of various palaces, each one illustrative of a particular facet of the seventeenth century; each complete down to the smallest detail of the art of its period. Jordan’s purpose in his Sicilian visit was to secure the loan of “The Gossips,” as I continued to call them, for the show, in one of the biggest halls in London, which was to last three months. I then remembered that one of the exhibition halls had been closed after three or four days, under dramatic circumstances, and had then reopened, but with part of it barred
to the public.

  I was trying to bring my mind to bear on the hazy details Jordan’s remarks had evoked in my mind, when his narrative was interrupted by the arrival of the waiter and the renewal of drinks. I took the opportunity to ask Grisson about the photographs he had taken for his book.

  In reply, he handed me a small cardboard wallet, with a wry smile. As our drinks were placed on the table, I examined it.

  I found I was holding several pieces of white, glossy paper. I could just make out hazy details of what appeared to be foliage. I was completely baffled, and asked Grisson what he meant by it.

  “These are the photographs I took with you,” he explained, his smile widening.

  I did not realize the import of his remark for a moment and added stupidly, “Were they overexposed?”

  “Quite impossible,” Grisson retorted dryly. “My books are noted for the quality of the photography. I always take my own photos, and I developed and printed these myself. I could see the negatives were almost blank, but I wanted to make completely sure, so I printed up what I could. As you see, there is only the faintest suspicion of the foliage in the palazzo garden.”

  I was bewildered and turned to Jordan.

  “They never have been photographed, you see,” he explained, almost apologetically. “‘The Gossips,’ I mean. Nothing ever comes out.”

  I was still trying to get my bearings but before I could go on, Grisson asked me to be patient and said that all would be explained when Jordan had told his story. It took some little while for our companion to take up the thread of his remarks again. He said he had first to explain to me what “The Gossips” represented in artistic terms, something of their history, and why he required them for the London show.

  “You might think,” he said, “that it would be an enormously expensive and cumbersome job to ship all that masonry to England. I offered the Duke, of course, complete carte blanche in the matter of expenses connected with the venture. In fact, it cost the old boy nothing, as we were covered by a British Government grant, only part of the shipping costs being borne by the exhibition organizers. And the inclusion of this group in the exhibition would be a sort of coup which seldom occurs.

  “The statues are masterpieces of their kind, and had never been seen outside their Sicilian setting. In fact, few people had seen them at all, which I thought at the time was a pity, in view of their antecedents.

  “The exhibition as a whole, packed as it would be with so many rare and extraordinary things, would not only bring an international cachet to the museum authorities and bodies connected with it in England, but would be worth an enormous sum of money.

  “This would arise, not only through entrance money to the exhibition itself, but via the many articles, broadcasts, magazines, and newspaper and photographic rights in journals and other media throughout the world. A film had been planned to cover the whole field, and also colored lantern-slides, which were to form the basis of lectures by eminent men in their various spheres.

  “My securing ‘The Gossips’ would set the seal on all this, in view of its extraordinary history, and my hopes were high when I went on my momentous errand to the Sicilian hinterland.”

  Jordan said he had not warned the Duke of his intentions, only of his arrival, and though he had expected at first a flat refusal, in view of the many difficulties to be overcome in connection with transporting the statues to England, he did not at all realize that he would receive such a cordial reception as the Duke gave him.

  But in fact, there was little objection on the latter’s part to loaning the statues when Jordan had explained the situation, and the Duke was enthusiastically cooperative, going into great detail on the technical problems involved. Jordan had broached his errand a full six months before the exhibition was due to begin in London, so there was plenty of time to put the scheme in train.

  I must emphasize, at this point, that Jordan, though he was fully conversant with the evil history of the statuary as it appeared in histories and books of various periods, had himself heard little or nothing of their unsavory reputation in the Sicilian countryside in modern times; and as he had no opportunity of discussing it with the local inhabitants, who are, in any case, reticent before strangers, it was hardly surprising.

  Jordan at first confined his researches to the books in the Duke’s library and, having been pressed to stay a day or two, delayed an examination of the statues in situ until the following day.

  I was disappointed to hear from the man’s own lips that, though he was fascinated and delighted with the group, which he thought well worth his time and long journey, nothing unusual had occurred in those early days. He had not, being a sensible man, seen anything extraordinary in the lichen, the vile stench (he had traveled too widely in South American jungles for that), or the sinister, red-streaked statues themselves. The troubles began later, and in a different form from those I had experienced.

  “If I may interrupt a moment,” said Grisson, waving for another round of drinks. “I think I ought to put our friend more in the picture by telling him something of the history of the palazzo and of the statues in particular. Have you ever heard of Caravallo?”

  I shook my head. Try as I would, the name meant nothing to me, and there was no reason why it should, for the man had been a minor Italian sculptor of the seventeenth century. His work stood really on the threshold of genius, but was marred by an evil way of life and a demoniac method of expressing his artistic impulses that came more and more to make his work looked on askance by the patrons and nobles who commissioned the artworks of the time.

  But he had apparently found a kindred soul in Leonardo, the then master of our Sicilian palazzo, Grisson told me. As he went on talking, I began to piece together a bizarre story, and much that had been dark and obscure to me before began slowly to fit into place, like the well-oiled tumblers in a lock.

  Leonardo was an authority on demonology and other blasphemous arts, and his thoroughly dissolute way of life had made him shunned by the local people quite early in his career.

  He had succeeded to the title at the age of nineteen, on the death of his father, and within only a few years the palazzo had become the scene of epic orgies indulged in by the local women and Leonardo and his friends.

  The evil fame of the man spread far afield, and beautiful women of all classes were guests for weeks at a time, from towns as far afield as Naples and Rome, as well as places on the island itself.

  Legend even had it that Leonardo’s mother was made to witness and take part in unspeakable ceremonies herself—she was a beautiful woman, only in her late thirties at the time of which Grisson was speaking—and when she was found dead one morning by a servant before attaining her fiftieth year, even uglier rumors began to gather.

  So it was at the height of Leonardo’s notoriety that people began to leave the immediate vicinity of the palazzo. There had been a small town there originally, as I think I mentioned earlier, but bands of young bloods were out at night, abducting eligible young women from local families whenever they got the opportunity, so that the young duke and his estate were the scandal of Sicily.

  It was at this stage in his wicked career that Leonardo came into contact with Caravallo. The two were greatly alike in many ways, and the duke had been delighted with the acquisition of a number of obscene but exquisitely wrought carvings, created by Caravallo as parodies in the Greek style. And it was also then that Caravallo had the notion which crowned his blasphemous fancy. Leonardo had currently three beautiful mistresses, three young sisters, each of whom seemed to outshine the azure sea in beauty. It was Leonardo’s custom to indulge with them mutually in indescribable orgies that, for lust and ingenious frenzy, far outdid the spectacles of ancient Rome. And when the moon was in certain quarters, ritual acts of sex magic took place between Leonardo and the three young girls in an ornately equipped “throne room” in the palace, in which other young men and women unashamedly took part—to the number of fifty or sixty persons, acco
rding to one old chronicle.

  Caravallo had often painted the women and his young friend in the most erotic and abandoned of acts, and his sketchbook was crammed with hundreds and hundreds of vile and shameful drawings that today, said Grisson, still existed in thirty or forty locked volumes of erotica in a sealed-off and almost permanently locked section of the present Duke’s library.

  It was Caravallo’s idea to compose a large group of statuary to perpetuate Leonardo and his coven of three young women. The original form of this had been of a nature which had blanched even Leonardo’s shameless cheeks, but he pointed out to his erratic genius that statuary could not be hidden as could smaller objets d’art, and as the statue would have to be more or less public. Because of its huge size, the form would have to take a semi-classical theme and the hidden, secret, and perverse meanings could be read into the public statuary by those “in the know.”

  The three young women were given, it might be added, said Grisson almost superfluously, to endless conversations and laughter among themselves. And their disporting in a pavilion in the grounds, long since burned down in a fire, their shrill chatter, sniggerings and mutterings, had earned them the nickname—the Sicilian equivalent—of “The Gossips” among the local people of the time.

  That their intentions and discussions were malicious there can be no doubt, and it would be interesting to discover, if it were possible, just who were the personalities, public and private, that formed the subject of their scandalous talk in those far-off days.

  At all events, Caravallo plunged eagerly into the new commission given him by the young duke, and for a time all went well. The statues were taking shape, when suddenly a bigger scandal than ever broke out. No records came down of it, but the story is that some incorruptible nobleman suddenly descended on the villa at the height of an orgy. At all events, the coven was broken, questions were asked in government circles, and the three young women, the center—with Leonardo—of the sensation, were hurriedly and secretly packed off to their own remote hometown.