Renaissance
by A. F. Kidd

A. F. Kidd, better known to her friends as Chico, has written and illustrated three small chapbooks of her own stories: Change & Decay, In and Out of the Belfry, and her latest, Bell Music, from which the following story is taken. Born in Nottingham on April 21, 1953, Kidd presently lives in Middlesex, where she manages to find time from her work to indulge her interests in Jamesian ghost stories and in campanology, the English art of change-ringing (it has to do with bells in towers -- look it up). Fortunately, since spare time is in short supply, she is able to combine illustration, writing, and bell-ringing all in one, and she is a frequent contributor to the British small press.
Now, about that novel. Kidd explains: "I'm still trying to get this damn sf novel under way but things like work intrude: I've got a design and advertising business now which seems to give me no spare time at all. You could say I'm working on it, if you like: I know more or less what's going to happen in it, it's just a case of transferring it from my head to paper!" Ah, there's the rub...

It's fashionable to say that the English have a fascination for Tuscany, but most people then go on to make derogatory remarks and deplore the fact that you can't spit without hitting an expatriate writer. I like to think that I like the area for its own sake. I love the crumbling voluptuousness of Florence: they paint the buildings in fading flesh-tones, which always put me in mind of peeling suntans. But it's uncompromising, too: presenting sleepy blank green-shuttered eyes to you instead of windows, and quite oblivious of the scooters skimming its narrow cobbly streets.
I first visited Tuscany more years ago than I care to remember, at the invitation of an extraordinary man by the name of Enrico Camilletti. An antiquarian and Anglophile, he and his family had been interned during the war (he'd been doing research at Cambridge) until a talent of his, which I'm not allowed to talk about, came to light; and that was how we met.
The Army's talent for inapt job selection, which sets the tone-deaf to bugling and the myopic to photographic reconnaissance, put me in Intelligence, a devious and exacting business for which my only qualification was linguistic ability. I had been trained as a singer, having what I was told was a "warm Italian tenor," and somehow had been seduced into learning to speak the languages as I learned to sing them. That, and painting, unmartial talents, gave me an entree to Enrico's world, and a useful Intelligence coup.
All this is old history; but when Enrico and his daughter (his wife had died in 1942, of cancer) returned to Italy, he left me with an open invitation to visit, and eventually I did so, armed with rucksack and paints.
Italy, perhaps by virtue of its past of warring city-states, still strikes me as extraordinarily diverse: Venice, which snags at the memory like a thorn, casting visions of narrow alleys and the reflections of gondolas; Rome, which I hate, being like London with ruins (only dirtier); the involved coast of the south, where houses climb the cliffs. And Tuscany, tower-studded, a landscape of trees like mist and hills like smoke, with the spiky diagrams of cypresses inked on the horizon and ragged red rooftops among the olive groves.
In the hills surrounding Florence I found a great domed church which could have been the twin of Sant-Andrea del la Valle in Rome, where the first act of Tosca is set.
The church struck chords within me as soon as I saw it: the sort of cool calm sacred stone, which opens into frescoes and mosaics of startling, ancient brilliance. There are parts of Tuscany where you feel overloaded with art, glutted with color, sated with gold, and the Renaissance lies long aeons in the future: there was a part of this church, San Donatus di Fiesole, which was so old it was almost alien. Most of it was fourteenth century, but one of the tiny chapels attached to it, cold rough stone, gave off such an aura -- or perhaps it would be more accurate to say "miasma" -- of age that you could almost believe the builder would have remembered the Apostles from personal experience. And the frescoes were, literally, unbelievable. On seeing them for the first time it felt as if my heart had suddenly loosened within me: I had entered that chapel expecting -- well, nothing at all; and had been confronted with something like a revelation.
As I entered, my eyes strained in the dim darkness: I could practically feel the pupils dilating. Gradually, as I became accustomed to the gloom, glints of jewel-like color and the dull gleam of gold began to encroach on my vision.
They were brilliant, those frescoes: as detailed as photographs. Slowly I paced along the chapel. Up and down I went: to and fro. Once or twice I touched, very delicately, the painted surface, almost unable to believe it was only a wall.
Some artist of consummate skill had been at work there: some painter so far ahead of his time that his fame should have shouted from there to Rome and beyond. Here shone a saint, his face abstracted; there, an angel of such beauty that it almost hurt to behold.
After a time, I became aware that a darker vision than I had first thought had been at work. The unknown artist had enhanced the beauty of his religious subject matter by introducing contrasts in the form of the grotesque and revolting. Grinning skulls and drooling demons leered from corners, made more malevolent by the skill of the draughtsmanship.
I came to a shuddering halt in front of one figure. It seemed to exude a powerful impression of evil quite disproportionate to its image: my spine crawled at the sight, yet there was little to see. It was cloaked, clawed; its face in shadow. Within its dark hood shone two faint glows, as of eyes. I decided I was quite glad that the artist had spared his audience full sight of the creature -- it was the sort of thing, had I been able to see what it really looked like, that would have destroyed my sanity in one glimpse. The thing was terrible for its understatement, its hidden threat -- there was no artifice there, no cheap shock value. But you knew, incontrovertibly, what it was. It was rather as if someone had shown me a pit and said: That's Hell. And I had known it for the literal truth.
I walked quite rapidly out of the chapel. Through the outer door, the sun had laid a honey-colored rectangle on the church's stone floor. Outside, a balmy breeze stirred the pale leaves of the olive trees, and pointed black cypresses moved gently. All quite normal. But I couldn't shake off the dull, poisonous conviction that that painted image was the representation of the negation of all that my life signified: music, art, harmony; all pleasant things.
Still, something compelled me to go and look again. This time, I saw the beautiful, not the grotesque. Sometimes Renaissance art is cruel to women (although it is not the artists, but the conventions of the time; you might just as well say, as I have heard some foolish people do, that opera is misogynistic); but here I found an image, which I ached to copy. I had no camera, and even if I had, in those days it would have been the height of discourtesy to go flashing lights in a church.
Mary Magdalene, I guessed: a tear glinted in her eye. Her hair was fair, like Primavera's: a little blonde strand fell over one brow. Tosca came into my mind again -- Chi e quella donna bionda lassu? / La Maddalena. Ti place? / E troppo bella.
I looked to see whether I could find someone -- priest? Sacristan? To give me permission to paint in the church, but in that early afternoon there was little sign of life. Lizards sneaked in the old stonewalls, the swiftest creatures to be seen; a few sightseers were wandering round in the gentle October sun. The only other moving objects were a pair of Franciscan monks in their brown habits, beneath which the sandals, which poked out, looked incongruously modern.
So I sat down on a wall and gazed absently at the delicate mist, which lay over Florence below, giving Brunelleschi's majestic dome the appearance of floating in a sea of cobwebs. And that was when things began to happen, on a misty-gold autumn day in Tuscany.
I flapped my shirt to try and cool down: I was running with sweat. A movement snagged the corner of my eye, and I turned, unaccountably troubled, but nothing was to be seen. Eventually, I decided, tentatively, to approach the monks; and after some consultation ascertained that it would be quite all right for me to paint inside the church.
In front of La Maddalena I set up my easel and began sketching, and sang Recondita armonia from Tosca because I felt just like Cavaradossi painting there. It was late when I packed up, leaving the easel where it was.
Enrico Camilletti inhabited the top floor apartment in a crumbling sunburn-colored building overlooking the river and (if you leaned out of the window and squinted) the Ponte Vecchio. The stairs were steep, worn stone, with cast-iron railings: it seemed a very long way to the top. But I was tired anyway, and went to bed early -- I was supposed to be on holiday for a rest (I had been working much too hard recently). That night I had an odd dream, which I was unable quite to recall in the morning. All that remained was a sense of something receding, and a voice saying (for all the world like something from an Italian-language course) "Non e qui; e li." It's not here, it's there.
The following day I was eager to return to the church and get on with my painting; Enrico's daughter Silvana asked me if she could come with me, and her father gave her permission -- you have to remember that this was not long after the war, when children were more dutiful than they are now, and Silvana was, oh, about seventeen, I should think. She was a nice, lively, bright child, as you would expect if you knew her father; fair and pretty and as thin as a stick.
It's still difficult to talk about this. It was rather like being shot. My copy of the fresco had changed -- had been changed. I didn't, couldn't, believe it at first: I remember taking off my glasses and polishing them, as if that would restore reality.
Framed by the ash-pale hair was a face turned hideous, corrupted into a worm-ridden thing of decay. Obscenely, a scab-colored tongue protruded between delicately pointed teeth.
I gasped for breath. Felt, physically, blood draining out of my face, and then surging back in like lava. Fury is too light a word. I wanted to commit murder.
"Dio," said Silvana softly, reaching out a tentative hand to the easel. I ripped the paper off before she could touch it, and she jumped back, startled.
"They weren't like this," she said, gesturing vaguely at the walls.
"What do you mean?"
She looked at the frescoes surrounding us with their primitive colors, vibrant and vital.
"They must have been -- hidden -- somehow. And now, for some reason, they're getting clearer again."
I saw what she meant, impossible as it sounded. "You mean if they'd been visible for centuries, they'd be famous?"
She nodded, and then suddenly pointed at the wall. "Look."
I looked. I winced. I don't know how I'd missed it. In the crowd gathered round the Crucifixion scene was a familiar face. It was identical: the blonde hair, the soft and rotting features. The tongue. And looking at the crowd now, I could see many more corrupted faces: not caricatures, but something more unpleasant.
So I searched for the cloaked figure, which had somehow taken on the role of a leitmotiv. (Was it something perhaps in a cloak, which kept sliding out of the corners of my vision?) There; it seemed clearer than it had been: the draperies gleamed, as if wet under moonlight, silver like snail-trails. Here and there the cloth molded itself to the form beneath: the shape of its limbs was totally unhuman.
"What if they're getting out?" whispered Silvana. I wasn't sure I'd heard her right at first. "I'm going to borrow Father's camera tomorrow."
"Will they mind you taking photographs?"
"Don't worry. If you smile and act humble, it's amazing what you can get away with."
"Let's go and have a drink," I said. Silvana hesitated. "I bet they won't move while you're looking at them."
"Like The Mezzotint, you mean?" she said, surprising me. "You're probably right."
As we passed the easel she cast a glance in its direction, which gave me an idea. I had a small sketchpad, which I hadn't actually used, but which I'd left by the easel.
"Do you think that'll have changed too?"
"That's what I want to find out," I replied, opening it. The first half-dozen pages were blank, but the next one, randomly selected, perhaps, bore an unpleasantly familiar outline, seemingly drawn in charcoal: that of a cloaked figure. Beneath it, in crabbed capitals, was the legend CAVEAT PICTOR.
"Beware the -- ?"
"Let the artist beware," I corrected her. "It's a warning, then. But why mess up the Magdalene picture?"
"It didn't," she said. Her voice had the inevitability of rain. "Whatever changed the picture is the thing you've got to beware of. After all, you've seen it, haven't you?"
Dark shape sliding past the corner of my eye. "Yes, I think so."
"And so did our unknown fresco painter."
"And it's his -- ghost -- that's warning us." I couldn't quite bring myself to say "me."
"Doesn't it make sense?" asked Silvana, sounding very like her father. "If it debased his paintings, wouldn't he want to warn another painter?"
"What is it, then, the thing in the cloak?"
She shrugged. "Elemental, demon, devil?" The word "elemental" reminded me of something. If she'd read James -- ?
"Did you ever read a story called Celui-la?"
" 'M, yes: who wrote it? Not M. R. James. Le Fanu?"
"Eleanor Scott."
"Yes, I was about thirteen when I read it -- it scared the hell out of me."
"Me, too," I agreed. "Well, that's what this reminds me of." Silvana looked back into the dim church. " Won e qui; e li'," I muttered.
"What?"
"Something I dreamed."
" 'It's not here; it's there'. I wonder what that's supposed to mean."
"Mm," I said.
"Well," she observed, "it's when 'it's here' that we really need to worry."
"That's a really nice thought. Thanks, Silvana."
Enrico was out when we got back, as he frequently seemed to be; it wasn't so easy to forget about elementals and things, which hid in cloaks, however. I got a real attack of the creeps that night, the worst I'd had since I was a child, suddenly turning cold all over in inexplicable panic. " 'Non e qui,' " I told myself, firmly. Then I switched the light on. The window was shuttered and the thin yellow curtain inside drawn, the bed turned down. But there were dark things in the corners of my eyes. They slid away when I tried to look at them. My hands were shaking.
I hadn't expected to sleep, but the lights were still on when I woke up, not as bright as the pencil-lines of daylight outlining the shutters. I opened them before switching off the lights: the walls nearby were already festooned with washing strung from every little balcony, though the air was still chill with mist drifting from the Arno. The city smelled old and salty-sweet.
Silvana was up already, and eager to go. She scribbled a note for her father, and practically dragged me out of the apartment. True to her word, she charmed permission to take photographs, and spent the morning doing so: I sat outside sketching and wondering about things you see in your peripheral vision. We had lunch in the one tiny trattoria in the town, and after that Silvana insisted on going to check up on the chapel.
I heard her indrawn breath first.
"It's gone, Harry," she hissed.
"My God, it must have got out," I whispered back, looking at the blank bare wall.
Where the hooded figure had been, the plaster had flaked away entirely. Patches of damp, or lichen, were stuck on the gray wall, as if many centuries had elapsed since the painting had vanished; neither was there any trace of dust or fragments of plaster on the floor. A wash of something very chill ran down my back.
"I've got to get the pictures developed," Silvana said. "Because it was there this morning."
"Silvana, my dear," I said to her, "I know this seems like a nice little puzzle for you, but do you seriously think this thing is dangerous? Because I don't mind admitting that it's beginning to get to me."
"Have you seen it again?"
"I don't know. I've reached a stage when I don't know whether I'm imagining it or not."
"Let's go outside."
"What for?"
"To see if you can see anything." I looked reluctant. "Don't worry," she added, probably a bit too blithely. "I don't think it can do anything to you -- I think all it can do is just scare you."
"It's doing that all right."
But before we could get outside, someone else came in.
"Harry? Harry Denham? Silvana, are you there?" called a familiar voice. It was Enrico, and I was suddenly very glad to see him.
"Silvana's note -- garbled as it was -- reminded me of something," he said before either of us could begin to explain, and produced an ancient-looking book from somewhere within his clothing.
"Chiesi di Toscana" said the cover. There was a paper marking a page: I opened the book and read "La leggenda del pittore Bruno della Tone." Silvana and I deciphered the blurred print together.
"High on a hillside outside Florence lies the ancient town of San Donatus di Fiesole, named for the church which is still its dominant building. This town has probably been the site of a settlement for at least as long as nearby Fiesole, but it lacks the spectacular Roman remains of its neighbor.
"It is notable only for its church, which contains, or contained, a series of remarkable frescoes. Unfortunately, the ravages of time have all but destroyed most of the detail -- "
"Hidden," hissed Silvana, jabbing the page with her linger.
" -- but what remains indicates work of a high quality and quite remarkable beauty. Little is known of the artist, Bruno della Torre, save for a curious local legend which has him pursued to his death -- " I looked at Enrico, appalled. "Pursued to his death by an evil spirit called out of the earth. Apparently Bruno's skill was such that it provoked the malevolent spirit, which existed for the purpose of corrupting anything of beauty, into haunting him. The nameless one was not appeased until had achieved his death: it is a matter of record that della Torre died by drowning in the year 1341." I turned the page: there was no more.
"I need to do some more research," Enrico said. "Come back to the apartment, you two: you can help."
Pursued to his death. I felt my scalp prickle, and then the shudder darted all the way down my back. Something would be awaiting me outside, something old and clawed and malefic. A creeping dread sluiced over me, so strong I felt suddenly ill and weak. It was a physical thing, fiercer than any childhood terror, paralyzing powerful: I didn't know how to cope with it. I don't get stage fright now, because I'm confident in what I'm doing -- but this was terrifyingly different. It wasn't simply that I didn't want to step outside the sanctuary of the church -- I didn't think I could.
"Are you coming?" Enrico asked me.
"Yes," I replied, and my voice sounded normal enough, much to my surprise, "I want to get a jacket -- it's getting a bit chilly." And I stepped out of the church door. To this day I don't know how I did it. I could feel my hands shaking inside my pockets, and I had to grit my teeth to stop them from chattering. But I kept going. The other two followed; and so too did a shadow, which rested only in my own peripheral vision and never let itself be seen. Now, though, it seemed closer to me, as if each day it was somehow entrenching itself deeper into my existence like some sort of parasite. Soon I might touch it; soon, even, it might try to make me see it. But that was something I would not do. If will had anything to do with the matter.
"Wait here, I'll get my car," said Enrico. I looked at Silvana again, wondering whether she could see how scared I was. I tried to slow my breathing, but something was shouting inside me to get away, to run, anywhere, but hurry! A bus pulled up opposite, and it was all I could do to restrain myself from dashing across the road and jumping on it. My mind framed the suggestion "let's get the bus" and I even opened my mouth to say it; and then a small red Fiat appeared and Enrico opened the passenger door.
As soon as Silvana shut the door the horror disappeared as abruptly as a thread snapping: I breathed out, suddenly aware of cold sweat on my face.
Enrico displayed admirable restraint in not asking any questions until we got upstairs, and then, having poured wine for all of us, looked at me enquiringly. I took a deep breath.
"Let me tell you what seems to be happening," I said, and explained as best I could.
"Extraordinary," said Enrico when I'd finished. "Remarkable. Let's see what we can find." He headed for the bookshelves.
"Have you ever seen a ghost before?" Silvana asked me. I shook my head. "Are you sure?"
"Positive," I said, "and anyway, it's not a ghost, according to that book. It's some kind of spirit. Out of the earth."
"Do you believe in ghosts?"
"I don't think so. I read ghost stories -- but I read science fiction too, so that doesn't prove anything."
"Actually I write ghost stories," said Silvana, "so I was just curious. It wasn't meant to be the third degree."
"Here's something," interrupted Enrico, handing me an ancient-looking tome. "This must be the source of the story in the book you've seen."
It was quite impossible to make out. I handed it back to him. "It's mediaeval -- isn't it? I can't make sense of it."
"It's -- ah -- fifteenth century. What it says -- mm. The painter called Bruno della Torre died in the year 1341, drowned in the Arno. A spirit out of the earth, of the kind we read of in the De Mysteriis of Andrea Verdecchio -- ' I have that, Silvana, can you find it for me? -- made sport to hound -- to dog his footsteps. Malevolent as Satan, its purpose was to chastise him for his art and to make corrupt what he had painted. Paintings in the church of San Donatus it corrupted, but could not corrupt the Christ. Della Torre tried to halt its progress by -- ' I think this means something like 'imprisoning it in paint'? Does that make sense to you, Harry?"
"Well, it could," I said slowly. "If it means by painting the creature."
"I see what you mean.' -- But even his skill was not sufficient. Only his death would return it whence it came.' "
"It seems a bit unfair on poor old della Torre," I said.
"Have you found that book, Silvana?"
"Here," she replied, handing him an even older-looking book, curiously bound.
"In such disgraceful Latin, too," commented Enrico. "This will take a little time. Let's have some more wine."
"Is that -- I don't know the Italian -- a 'grimoire'?" I asked. "May I see?"
"Here; I don't know the word you use."
"Magic would be nigromancia... Libro nero?"
"Black book?" repeated Enrico.
"A magician's book? A book of spells?" I recalled the Latin word. "Grimorium?"
"Ah, I know. Yes, for summoning spirits and so on."
" 'I can call spirits from the vasty deep,' " said Silvana surprisingly, in English. I had to respond.
" 'But will they come -- ' Trouble is, one has, but we didn't call it," I added, looking over Enrico's shoulder. "Crikey, talk about dog Latin."
"Can you read it, Harry?"
"Can I hell," I said. "Maybe."
"Have you found something?" Silvana enquired.
"I don't know yet."
I looked up, out of the window, probably hoping not to see anything. It was getting dark outside, still, jeweled with lights. Silvana got to her feet at the same moment, and closed the shutters. Then she busied herself with the record player, and presently we got Trovatore. Verdi's music filled the room's corners. It seemed to me then that the pursuer could only threaten me out of doors; that sanctuary was to be found inside spaces.
"Here -- something," exclaimed Enrico. I went to look over his shoulder: he pointed to a passage in the book.
"What have you found?" asked Silvana.
"Something, yes. 'The creatures from the deep,' it says."
"From the deep? Sounds like some particularly lurid fiction."
"No, it's real enough, alas! This book was written by an old Italian magician in -- when, Enrico?"
"Oh, 1410 or around that time. Andrea Verdecchio, he was said to have the power of flying, like your Roger Bacon, Michael Scot."
"What does it say?" Silvana asked.
"It says," replied her father, "as far as I can make out, because this is the most execrable Latin I've ever seen, 'There are beings, creatures, call them spirits if you will, which reside in the earth, fiends of the earth, they who walk in deep places; there is much power in them but they are capricious and do not bend willingly to a man's rule.' Then I think it tells you how to summon them, but I don't think we'll read that bit -- "
"Power in the words," observed Silvana.
"But does it tell us how to get rid of them?" I asked. "To be more to the point."
"It's infuriatingly obtuse. In one place it says, um, 'Some of these spirits will not abide the sound of bells' and then it says the 'spirits of ill-favor' -- hang on, this might be it -- 'will not abide if they can be absorbed by their own image.' "
"Isn't that what Bruno tried?" asked Silvana.
"It must be," I said, "but the painting's gone -- "
"But your photos are still -- "
"My God -- -in the camera. I've got to send them off."
"Send them off?"
"They're slides, they have to -- "
"Never mind that," interrupted Enrico. "Phone Paolo Rossi -- his number's in the book -- he'll get them rushed through somewhere." Silvana went to the telephone.
"Do you think it'll come out on film?" I asked. "Would a picture of a picture work?"
"Perhaps we can trap it with a flashbulb," Enrico suggested. "Let me go and dig some out."
"He says to bring them round," Silvana said, putting down the phone. "He knows a lab. Shall I go?"
"We'll all go," her father said.
You never remember fear. Or -- that's not quite right -- you can't recall it accurately. Oh, I can remember all the physical sensations quite vividly, the purely automatic reactions my body was making to being under threat: heartbeat up, rapid breathing, dry mouth, stomach cramps, nausea, sweat; "sick with fear" is dead accurate. But I can't recreate the actual straining horror and dread of the unknown, terror of what lay unseen within the dark hood: the sure and utter conviction that there are things which can drive a man insane just by seeing them, even a thirty-five-year-old, pragmatic, highly educated inhabitant of the twentieth century. That's horror. That's what panic is, wanting to run and run from the impossible to assimilate. I didn't know what it could do -- suck the flesh from my bones, the soul from my body, leave me voiceless. I didn't know. That was the worst thing of all. Not knowing what I was going to face.
The stairwell was dark. Some of the lights had blown and not been replaced. Dim glows were discernible, but only made the shadows between them all the darker.
On rubbery legs I started down the stairs. The iron rail was cold to the touch. I reached the landing below, which was pitch black. "All clear," I called hoarsely, and heard the footsteps of the others.
"Wait," called Silvana. "One of us should go in front of you."
"I'll go first," volunteered Enrico. "I know the stairs."
We set off again, Enrico first, then myself, and then Silvana with the camera. My foot slipped, and I grabbed at the railing, heart lurching.
"You OK?" hissed Silvana.
"Yes," I whispered back, lying. Still, the next landing was lit. We halted again. Out of the shadows a cat yelled, making us all jump. (Why do all the cats in Tuscany seem to have such loud voices?)
"That cat will sing soprano if I get hold of it," I growled when we'd pulled ourselves together.
"It does already," said Enrico over his shoulder. "It's a female."
Halfway down the next flight I felt its presence. I started to turn, stopped myself in time, caught a dreadful glimpse in the flash of the camera of a grinning mouth with pale lips surrounding impossibly many teeth -- then something dreadfully cold, cold as starlight, raked across my face, knocking me off balance and sending my specs flying: I fell with a shout of alarm.
I tried to stop myself, but you can't halt a fall downstairs -- it just doesn't work; I hit my head a glancing blow on the railings, and then Enrico broke my fall. We went down together in a heap on the landing, and then he clutched my arm as a cry split the air.
The very shape of that cry was wrong -- no human throat could have given it voice. There was hunger in it, and fury, and hatred, and nothing at all of defeat.
Silvana came clattering down the stairs, her face white as ice, and the camera dangling from one hand. I groped for my specs, found them with one lens shattered. Too bad. I'd just have to walk around with fuzzy vision until I could get them replaced.
"Are you all right?" she demanded in an anguished whisper.
"I think so," I whispered back, getting unsteadily to my feet, as Enrico did the same. "What happened?"
"I'm not sure," Silvana admitted. "I felt something cold -- chilly air, but moving -- so I fired off the camera -- I certainly don't want to hear anything like that... noise... ever again."
"Or see it," I said. "Those teeth -- " I shut my eyes.
"We didn't see it," said Enrico. "All we saw was you -- and when you fell."
"Can you make it back upstairs?" Silvana asked me. I was holding myself upright by the railing. "Or the neighbors are going to start emerging. Your head -- ?"
"Hurts," I replied. "But I'll live."
"I'll take the film," said Silvana, and disappeared down the stairs. My legs didn't want to support me, so Enrico helped me back up to the apartment. Fumbling with his keys, he asked, "Has the creature gone, do you think?"
"I don't think so," I replied. "We may have burned its fingers (if it has fingers) but I don't think we've got rid of it."
Enrico unlocked the door. "I think food and rest, and some more wine," he said. "Then, Harry, we'll get back to the grimoire."
In the hall I caught sight of myself in a mirror. There was a lump the size of a golf-ball on my forehead and a line of bruises across my left cheekbone. I prodded it gingerly. That was where I'd felt the icy touch of my pursuer. If it was the mark of its claw, it had not broken the skin, but the place was chill and numb.
"You'll have a lovely shiner in the morning," said Enrico.
Dangerous. It was dangerous, and none of us had really realized. And none of us had the least idea what to do next. Enrico and I went back to the books, but their advice was at worst incomprehensible and at best conflicting. The business about the image, for instance: I still thought it might work, but couldn't make out whether it had to be an exact likeness, a painted figure, or a reflection in a mirror, and I couldn't really keep on and on baiting it until we got it right. We had to have a certain solution.
"I wish we could have filmed it," observed Silvana.
"Well we didn't," I said. "I didn't expect it to disappear from the wall."
"The wall..." she mused. Then her face suddenly lit up. "Harry! I've got it!"
"Got what?"
"I've cracked it, I think. If the photos come out."
"What've you thought of, Silvana?" asked her father.
"We project the image onto the wall! Life-size!"
Enrico looked thunderstruck, then grinned. "I hope those photos come out. Did Paolo say what time he'd get them in?"
"About half-past ten, I think. Can you borrow a slide projector?"
"I'll find one," Enrico said grimly. But it was late before he managed it.
I got through the day: even when the worst happens, you somehow keep going; giving up isn't the way to manage life. The dread I succeeded in tamping down to a vague sickness, which only surged up occasionally, but I was starting to get really twitchy by the time the four of us were crammed into Enrico's Fiat once more. Although I was convinced that Silvana's idea would work: the paint had become creature, and its image would be true. And the old magician's book implied that this would be enough.
The slides were clearer than any of us had hoped, showing in fine detail the cloak's folds (or were they the creases of bat-like wings?), the slug-track gleam of it, the humping inhuman outline.
We crept into the church like fugitives. The few candles burning here and there only accentuated the darkness, leaf-shaped flames making refugee afterimages in one's eyes. Windows were reduced to gray shapes on black, admitting no light. Enrico turned on his torch, and I was struck by how harsh its beam was, cold and contrasty.
"Here comes the bait," I said, swallowing bile, which had sneaked into my throat. Silvana squeezed my hand.
"Don't worry," she whispered. "It'll work."
Enrico pushed open the door of the chapel. If I go in there, I thought, will I ever come out again? My legs felt boneless. We crowded in; the torch picked out a trestle table with a slide projector sitting on top of it.
"How long?" murmured Enrico.
"Not long," I replied. I was certain of that, if of nothing else. It was homing in on me like a beacon: I was brighter than a lighthouse to it, and as difficult to extinguish; and it had marked me, too.
Then the door slammed shut. Enrico told me later that it had wrenched itself out of his grasp and all but crushed the foot he'd positioned in the doorway. Someone drew in a sharp breath.
"Oh God," I whispered, as a great wave of freezing, foetid air broke past me. Light burst on the opposite wall like a sun: Enrico had turned on the projector; I was transfixed, seeing shadow and darkness boil and coalesce into a vast looming shape. The wall itself seemed to flow into it, giving it substance: horned it was now, grown great in malice, and it wanted me to look directly at it, and lose my mind; or have it taken over. I felt it smile, and that was almost too much to bear, felt it beckon -- and were there words on its noisome breath, insidious, inviting words? I could see the folds of its robe, its palpable shadow. The moment stretched to impossible length, and the force was becoming irresistible. I lifted my head, unable to prevent myself.
"Painter, look away," called a voice inside my brain, speaking strangely accented Italian. It broke the spell; but in the split second before it succeeded, I saw what I had struggled not to see in all its terrible beauty. Saw, but with my short sight, not clearly: I did not succumb.
Yes, it was homed: yes, it was fanged, and clawed. But the face of a fallen angel which the creature wore, or inhabited, was the most perilous thing I have ever seen, for temptation, for risking your soul: for wanting to risk that much, and more. Then suddenly superimposed on its form was its veiled likeness, precise as the photograph it was, molded onto it. Once more came its cry, drilling through our heads, and we all clamped hands to our ears as it shrank into itself, into its image, dwindling even as the shriek died away, becoming paint once more, paint which flaked from the wall into the finest of colored dust on the floor.
My legs gave way altogether. I sagged against the wall and slid gently down it, like a drunk: the others, when they could move, helped me up and I consumed most of the contents of Enrico's hip flask before I stopped shaking.
"Thank you," I muttered, but whether I meant the two of them or the voice, which had brought me out of my dreadful compulsion, I don't know. They had not heard that voice, nor seen the chiseled perfection of the creature's beauty; but at the last had seen the thing collapsing in upon itself, finally confined by its image.
"The accent was strange," I said to Enrico, "archaic perhaps?"
His thought was the same as mine: "So it came back to Bruno della Torre, in the end."
"Or," Silvana said, "he came back to it. To finish what he began."
"It's a strong obligation," I said quietly. "Nearly six hundred and fifty years."
"Requiescat in pace," said Enrico. "There'll be no trace left in those photographs, I'll be willing to bet."
But when we looked at them I wasn't so sure. They were all faded to white, or gone to black; but faintly, so faintly I couldn't make it out with any certainty, I thought the outline of the pursuer remained.
Unless, as Silvana thinks, it was an outline imprinted on my own eyes, like a negative itself. If she is right, that too seems to have faded over the years; but I still sometimes wonder which of the images Bruno della Torre threw himself into the Arno in order to escape.