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 fist-fight: 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, caro.” 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 runnings 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 pizazz 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.”
&n
bsp; “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 spooky 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 toward 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?”
“The road is very bad, father,” Serafina said, indicating the priest’s flowing robe, his gleaming shoes.
He grinned broadly. “No problem,” he said, and winked. Sexy, yes. Gardiner could see that. “I will be right back.” He went up to his room and returned quickly in khaki trousers, a light windbreaker over a T-shirt, and sturdy boots. All that remained of his clerical garb was the cross and the black cylindrical hat.
When they reached the church, Gardiner made as though to enter first, but Father Demetrios asked for the flashlight and waved him aside. Entering the building a step behind Father Demetrios, Gardiner saw that the mosaics had reverted to their original innocuous form: shepherds and patriarchs, Abraham and Isaac, the Nativity, the journey to Bethlehem.
“Quite remarkable,” said Father Demetrios. “You have photographs of the other state?”
“I tried. The camera flash wouldn’t go off.”
“That is to be expected. Let us go outside and wait a little while.”
For ten minutes they stood in the clearing; then the priest sent Gardiner into the church alone. This time the walls were covered with a wild conglomeration of diabolic filth: a gory massacre, a bestial orgy, a witches’ sabbath, and more. He ran to the doorway. “Father! Father! Come and see!” The priest hurried in, followed by Serafina. When Gardiner turned to illuminate the mosaics again, they were as they had been before, pure, holy.
He felt his face flaming. “I swear to you, father—”
“Yes. I understand. They are great masters of roguery. We will wait once again.” But, though they went in and out of the church several times over the next hour, the mosaics were unchanged. They would not revert to the hideous apocalyptic form. Gardiner found that maddening. He wanted to see the demons again, with the priest as witness. He needed to see the demons again.
But the demons would not appear, and finally they gave up. On the way back to town Gardiner studied the priest carefully, wondering if the man suspected him of being some kind of lunatic. But Serafina had seen the distorted mosaics too. Thank God for that, he thought. He would be just about ready to sign up with a shrink by now, otherwise.
“I must think profoundly about this,” said Father Demetrios, and went to his room. Serafina said she had to go to her grandmother: she told Gardiner she would join him for dinner. Gardiner stood by himself in the empty piazza, watching solid-looking heat-shimmers go spiraling upward. This was the hottest day yet. The town was like an oven.
In late afternoon, unable to bear any of this any longer, Gardiner went back across to the church yet again, and found its walls once more bright with capering loathsomenesses. They no longer frightened him; they simply made him sad. He could weep with the sadness of it all. He had found such lovely sweet mosaics in this unexpected place, such marvels of naive medieval art. Why wouldn’t they stay that way? Why did they have to assail him like this, striking at the foundations of his sanity? For a long time he stood swaying in the midst of this den of horrors, looking with distaste and disbelief from scene to scene. The chapel seemed airless in the pounding heat, as though every atom of oxygen had fled from it into the sky.
The figures appeared to be moving. That was a new phenomenon, and an awful one. He blinked at them. His hand quivered as he moved the flashlight beam from place to place. The leering dancers—the unthinkable shapes—
Somehow the flashlight fell from his hand, and went out as it hit the ground. Gardiner knelt, groping for it in the stifling darkness. He was unable to find it, nor did he have the strength to make his way out of the church. He simply crouched where he was, kneeling, head downward, wearily resting both his palms on the sandy soil.
He felt a hand on his shoulder. A calm voice: “Let us go outside, my friend.” Father Demetrios.
“I fell asleep, I guess,” said Gardiner.
“No,” said the priest. “Not really.”
Father Demetrios had a flashlight of his own, a dim one. Gardiner pointed at the walls. They were still covered with monsters.
“Do you see them?” Gardiner asked raggedly.
“I see them, yes. You wanted to find mosaics here, and you found them, eh? B
ut I think you wanted it a little too hard. This is what happens, when they know you want something too hard.”
“When they know? What they? Who?”
“Come,” the priest said. “Outside.”
Father Demetrios led him from the building and sat him down in the clearing. Dusk had come. Serafina was not there. Gardiner noticed that the priest had placed a number of lighted candles on the ground all about the building. He was taking things from a backpack: a crucifix, a couple of small silver chalices, a Bible.
“Are you going to do an exorcism?” Gardiner asked.
“A reconsecration,” said Father Demetrios. “I have not the authority to do exorcisms. The effect will be the same, though. You will please say nothing of this to anyone, yes? There is some irregularity in my proceeding on my own this way.” He was going about the building, now, anointing it with oil from one of the chalices. “This is all to be our little secret, do we agree?”
Gardiner’s head was swimming. He heard the priest chanting in Greek and saw him raising and lowering candles and making the sign of the cross on the walls with the holy oil. It went on and on. Then he knelt a long time in prayer. “We are done,” Father Demetrios said at last. “Let us go back to the village, now.”
“Shall we look inside the church, first?” Gardiner asked.
“I think not. Let us simply go.”
“No. I have to see,” said Gardiner. He took one of the candles out of the ground and used it to light his way.
The walls were as blank as if Father Demetrios had whitewashed them. After a moment’s hesitation he put out his forefinger and rubbed. A rough stucco surface; no hint of the smoothness of mosaic tile anywhere. Even in this asphyxiating heat, Gardiner felt a chill spreading over him. This was the last straw, this newest mutation. He knew he had to flee, not just the church but the town itself. There was nothing solid here, only abysses beneath abysses.