She Walks in Darkness (4 page)

Oh, Richard! Richard!

Well, I had done all I could. His other hurts seem to be only bruises and minor burns, and I washed them with soap and water. I longed to drop my aching, still filthy body (I had not stopped to scrub the mud off) down beside him, to sleep and forget. But something made me stagger back into the anteroom and bolt the heavy door, the only door that connects our quarters with the rest of the house. I don’t know why I did that. Perhaps it was pure childish fear of all those vacant, darkening rooms around us, of the black maze that surrounded us like a twilight jungle.

At any rate I did bolt the door, and now I thank God that I did.

I dropped beside Richard, too tired to draw the curtains. The garden was a pit of darkness now, but the white giantess, Eos, towered above it like the very Angel of Death. The fading flame of the clouds behind her gave her a look of wrath, of outraged power. As if she had just been cheated of her prey. The red light soon faded. But as I watched her huge wings darken, I was reminded of a giant bat’s.

I turned my head away; I didn’t want to see her. That is the last thing I remember....

Sounds woke me; I sat up sharply. Moonlight filled both rooms now, strong enough to show everything but color. Richard was breathing regularly, normally, beside me. My hand groped for him, and for a second the feel of him reassured me.

Then they came again—the sounds at the door!

The great, carved slab of wood was stirring, ever so slightly, in its ancient place. Its hinges creaked.

Somebody was trying to get in!

Not knocking—at a knock I would have jumped up, joyfully sure that Mattia Rossi had come at last. This quiet tugging at the door was stealthy, sinister. It kept on, soft, patient, determined. Whoever was out there in the hall did not want to be heard, but he wanted to get in. Badly.

I lay rigid, telling myself,
It must be Mattia Rossi. He doesn’t knock because he’s afraid of waking us. He’s seen the
wreck; he knows we’ve had a bad time. He just wants to be sure we’re all right.

I tried to call out, but I was afraid.

At last they stopped, those quietly horrible little noises. I heard receding footsteps, soft, yet very clear on the stone flagging.

Silence flowed back, engulfed us like gently lapping water. I rose and ran for the bathroom; it was dark in there, so I tried to turn on the light.

It would not turn on.

Neither would the lights in the bedroom, nor in the anteroom. The trunk—the fugitive—that must have been when I first thought of them. Or had their images been tugging softly at the door of my mind all along, just as that unseen but very real hand had just tugged at the wooden door?

But electricity couldn’t be depended on in an isolated place like this. And there were matches in one of our suitcases. I found them, and lit the lantern I had bought in Volterra. Warm light sprang up, banishing the eerie moon-paleness, and I felt like an idiot. Of course it had been Mattia Rossi at the door. What if he had acted a little queerly: He might have had a few drinks with friends in town. I had missed the chance to get help, and now I would have to go after it. Down these dark halls, by myself. Well, it served me right.

I set my teeth and opened the door. The darkness outside seemed ready to spring at me, like a live thing, and I jerked back, then set my teeth a little harder.
No more foolishness, Barbara. You’re not a little girl now, to be afraid of the dark.

I stepped out into it, holding the lantern high. My light had shrunk suddenly, seemed pitifully inadequate against all that blackness.

There was a door on my left, between me and the stairs. If it should open—

A dozen times I saw that door move. Yet when I came abreast of it, my body scraping the opposite wall, it was still shut; it had never stirred. Now was its time, though. If it suddenly should open, if somebody should spring out—

I was past it. Nothing had happened. But it still could open softly, stealthily behind me....

I went down the beautiful stairway, through the great hall, hesitated, then turned right. I had not seen this part of the house at all. Would this once have been called a drawing room? No, this next one was even finer, with white marble nymphs upholding the fireplace, the whole thing exquisite enough to be a flower.

Room after lovely room, all of them silent. Doors, and more doors, sometimes on both sides of me—and all of them like hands that at any moment might shoot out from the walls to seize me. I was a chicken, and they were all hawks, waiting to pounce—

I went right, then left. I found a room that must be the dining room, and then the huge, dreary old kitchen that Mrs. Harris had called antiquated. Doors again, more doors. I opened one and jumped back, shuddering
at the Stygian darkness below. The cellars! I shut that door fast. I opened another, saw more stairs, small, shabby but leading upward. My heart leapt. This must be the way to the servants’ quarters!

But it was not Mattia Rossi I met at the head of those stairs.

The man was kneeling in the darkness just beyond the top step. I saw his hard red face in the lantern light, and I tried to scream. But I could not scream, I couldn’t move. I just stood there, too paralyzed even to drop the lantern.

But he did not move either, his hard red face did not change. His eyes—there was something wrong with them. And then I put my lantern down and clapped both hands over my mouth to keep back the crazy laughter. For he was an urn! A squat funeral urn, its two handles quaintly, grotesquely, like arms akimbo. The redness of the terra cotta head, the dead man’s portrait, had fooled me. He was incredibly lifelike, yet death had diminished him. He sat there like some pot-bellied dwarf, staring blindly and haughtily into eternity.
Did your slaves scream in time to the music to which you had them flogged?
I wondered as I passed him.

I am glad now that I didn’t laugh at him. Laughter makes a noise....

I found several cell-like little rooms, but only one looked lived in. It was very clean, as were the neatly arranged clothes and poor possessions stored in it: a man’s room.

“Mattia Rossi!” I almost called his name aloud. Again, I am glad I didn’t.

But where was he? Could he have gone down into the cellars for something? Had I the courage to look for him there? I must have—the sooner Richard had a doctor, the better.

Somehow I got back to that dreaded door, steeled my heart, and reopened it. I swung the lantern as far forward as I could, hardly daring to hope its light would reach the bottom of the stairs. But it did. I saw him.

Blood stained his gray hair and the gray stones around him. He lay very still; he had that queerly flat, empty look. Yet my first thought was only that he had fallen, hurt himself. I ran down to help him. But when I saw the bloody wreckage of his head, the wide, glazed eyes, I knew. This wasn’t Mattia Rossi. Not any more. This was no accident either, but the brutal work of human hands.

I ran back upstairs. I left the door swinging wide behind me. Did that open door mean something to whoever came later? Did he remember that when he left old Mattia, he had closed it? Can human flesh and blood be callous enough to be sure about a thing like that? After such an act as his?

If he is, he knows that his handiwork has been seen. Dear God, let him be sane enough to be afraid—to run away!

 
never dreamed that I would be able to sleep again that night, but I did. I woke with the mid-morning sun in my eyes, with Richard breathing quietly beside me. For an instant I was happy; then everything came back.

But Richard was breathing; he
is
breathing! Everything could be so much worse, so much, much worse!

I got up, wanting coffee badly, but there was still no electricity. I had to eat cold bread and butter and fruit, but they were wonderfully good. I didn’t realize, until I tasted them, that I had had no solid food since I left Volterra. It brought my strength back, and I sat down and tried to think things over.

Perhaps it is not the prisoner from Volterra. Probably no escaped maniac or professional criminal hid in our car and came here with us. I wish that that illogical fantasy would stop haunting me! But somebody may have heard of all those fabulous discoveries that Prince
Mino probably never made, have come here to look for gold. Only scholars understand that all buried treasure is not gold....

I can hear Richard’s voice, saying, only a few days ago, “The Rasenna had great goldsmiths, Barby. I’ve seen a queen’s jewels—necklaces, brooches, breastplate even, a mass of pure gold—and yet all of it put together didn’t weigh more than a bouquet of roses. There’s no telling what treasures this country still holds. For ages Etruscan tombs have been looted, yet there’s still plenty to be found.

“It’s an off chance, but old Harris just might find something big. Bigger than anything that ever has been found. Prince Mino believed that the villa had been built over the site of an ancient temple to Mania, Queen of the Underworld.”

“Mania?” I remember being surprised. “I didn’t know that that was ever anybody’s name.”

“It was the old Etruscan name for the Queen of the Underworld before they began using Greek script and names, and identified her with Persephone. Her rites weren’t pretty. Roman records mention the substitution of poppyheads for the kind of offerings she’d received earlier.”

“The heads of prisoners of war? Was she something like an Aztec goddess?”

He made a face. “Little boys’ heads, honey.”

“Richard!”

“You needn’t look like that, Barbs. Every holiday
weekend at home we probably sacrifice more kids to our fast driving than poor old Mania ever got in a month of Sundays.”

“That’s different. Nobody who’s driving a car intends to kill anybody; they just do it. And people who get run over don’t know it’s coming. They don’t have to wait—expecting it—”

“They die all the same. Painful, bloody deaths. Not always as swift as those on an altar.”

“It’s horrible, Rick, but it
is
different.”

“That’s a woman’s argument for you.”

“I am a woman, Richard.”

His eyes kindled. “I know. My woman. Come over here and stop talking.”

We were so happy, there in Florence! If only we had stayed there....

Later that same day, I remember asking, “What made the prince think the Queen of the Dead had had a temple there?”

“His ancestor built the villa over the site of an old monastery. One deserted before the ninth century, probably because of plague. Prince Mino had a coffer full of fragments of the old monastic records; they’ve disappeared, along with most of his own notes, but one passage is known to have read something like this: ‘...that demon-mistress of the damned to whose nefarious and bloody worship this place was dedicated of old...the wrath of that power of Evil still pursues us whose holy house was built here to wipe out the memory of her abominations.’ And then just a few broken words: ‘...Mania...mistress here through the ages...Pilgrims....’”

“And that’s all?”

“All his highness ever showed anybody. But he hinted that he’d found much more. That the temple still existed down beneath the tombs and that it held copies of the famous, long-lost Etruscan books. Even of archives brought by Tyrrhenus and Tarchon—the mythical migrating princes from the East. From their original ‘High Place,’ their fabulous lost city of Tyrrha, from which our word ‘tower’ comes. Records written in gold in a lost script as well as in a lost tongue, not the modified Greek alphabet that the historic Etruscans used.”

“And you think it could be true?”

He chuckled. “Old Harris and I would gladly settle for a lot less. That pre-Greek script’s probably bosh, but the lost
Etruscan Discipline
, as it was called—the books containing their history and the Divine Revelation that gave them the laws they lived by”—he sobered, his eyes shone—“That was real, Barby, And it would be the biggest find since Knossos!”

Also in an underground temple there could be many other marvelous things. Statues, vases, the offerings of generations of pilgrims, some of them, perhaps, of pure gold....

So many people will do anything for gold. Many who would not rob the living will rob the long-dead. Somebody could have come here intending to do only
that, and then have panicked when he ran into poor old Mattia Rossi. A person who killed in panic would surely be horrified when he saw what he had done, would surely run away as fast as he could.

But somebody did try our door last night! What if it is a madman? If he is still here? Waiting, watching....

Stop that. Barbara! Or you’ll go mad yourself.

If only I could talk to you, Richard! If only you would open your eyes and look at me, with all the warmth and strength and steadiness that are you! But you only lie there like an image, an empty, three-dimensional image of yourself. Where are people, when they are asleep or unconscious? Can one really snap into and out of being like that?

I am alone, and I must face things by myself. Either the murderer has run away, or he is still here. In this house, with us....

I can do one of two things. I can go for help, or I can stay here, behind this barred door, until help comes.

But when will that be? Did old Mattia have any regular visitors? Richard and I know nobody in Italy but Dr. Pulcinelli, and he has already received us, entertained us. Now he will wait for an invitation from us. No milkman will come, no postman, as they would at home. All that old Mattia could not raise on the place, he bought in town, and we were to pick up our mail in Volterra.

And Richard needs a doctor!

I must go for help. Down that long, lonely road that even yesterday, from the car, looked so godforsaken and forbidding.

Perhaps with someone following me? Someone who can’t afford to let me get help?

No! No! I can’t do that! I will stay here!

But the heaviest door can be battered down. No vines or trees are dangerously near our windows, but Mattia may have had a ladder. There are tools, too, that can take the hinges off the strongest door. And nobody to hear me if I scream.

The murderer could come at any moment. Even now.

I must go, I must! And leave Richard alone behind an unlocked door? I can’t do that! I can’t!

But Richard needs a doctor.

For a little while I cried. The sound was terrible; I began to seem to hear it from a distance, as if someone else were making it. But it was one terror over which I had control; realization of that helped me. I stopped.

There must be keys somewhere. Probably in Mattia Rossi’s room. Keys would give Richard some measure of safety....

I opened the door. Stepping out into the corridor was like jumping into a deep pit, but somehow I did it.

That other closed door again, still like a hand that might suddenly reach out and grab me. And then the stairs....

Just think of each step as you take it. Not of all the many more that you must take.

In the kitchen, in front of that open door that showed
the cellar stairs, I stopped for a second, frozen. They looked so dark even now, at noon. As my grandmother’s back stairs used to look in Indiana, when I was very small. I could almost hear my dead mother’s voice again. “There’s nothing there, Babsie. Nothing at all.”

But this time there is something there, Mother. A murdered man, and maybe his murderer. I may be near you....

I went on, trying not to imagine soft footsteps padding up those stairs, then coming up behind me....

I climbed that little third stairway, I passed that dreadful little man who is a funeral jar—a Canopic jar, I think Richard would call him. He was still smirking, just as he may have smirked, ages ago, at pleading slaves who didn’t want to be flogged, even to music.

Mania, Eos, whatever your name is, have mercy on us who are beneath your outspread wings!

I made it. I reached Mattia’s room, ran frantically into it. Behind its bolted door I ransacked every drawer in it, and found no keys. Then I ran back downstairs and ransacked every drawer in the kitchen too.

There are no keys!

Has somebody taken them? Nobody who was leaving the house would have....

Like a trapped animal, my mind tried to scramble away from that thought. Could Mattia have taken the keys with him when he went down into the cellar? I hadn’t seen them, but then I hadn’t really seen anything last night but his poor old body and the blood around it.

Could I make myself go down there to look for them?

I had to; I couldn’t leave Richard alone behind an unlocked door.

I must go down and search Mattia’s body....

But he was not there. There was nothing there. No blood, no body, nothing at all.

I stared and stared. As if by staring I could make the horror rematerialize, lie there on those gray stones, and so prove to myself that I wasn’t mad. Then I ran.

“What shall I do? What shall I do?” I heard myself sobbing that and, foolishly, pressed my hands against my mouth again to stop the sound. As if someone else were making it.

If I were heard—!

The great hall at last, the great stairs. The way back up to Richard! I stopped, gasping. I had to have a second to get my breath before I tackled those last stairs. No matter who or what was behind me.

I heard it then. Like an answer to prayer. Something falling—not hard—on the stones of the courtyard outside. Outside! Somebody had come!

I ran to the big entrance doors and flung them wide. I saw a bicycle out there, in the safe warm sunshine, and a young man bending over it. For a few seconds then everything was vague, but I know I screamed at him. I know I heard running feet upon the stones, and ran to meet them, my arms outstretched. Felt arms close round me. Strong arms—blessedly warm and strong!

“Aita! Aita!”
I kept sobbing that one word against his shoulder, against the hard, wonderfully alive flesh that I could feel through the rough tweed coat. He spoke to me in Italian, but I only kept on sobbing,
“Aita!
(Help!)” I couldn’t remember any other Italian word. And then what seemed like another miracle happened.

“You wish help, signorina?” He spoke in perfect English; his deep young voice was courteous, almost tender.

I said, “Oh, thank God!”

There is a fountain in the courtyard; he made me sit down on a stone bench, and went to get water. With his wet handkerchief, he bathed my face, smiling. His own face was as beautiful as any sculpture or painting I had seen since I came to Italy, and it was not carved or painted—it was warm, human flesh.