Valerio Manfredi: The Ancient Curse

‘What I’d like to know is… how did this porter get into the palazzo anyway, since it’s been closed and locked up all these years?’

‘Well, you see, Doctor, there’s a secret passage that leads from the Caretti-Riccardi palace to the chapel of the Holy Souls in Purgatory near the Etruscan cistern. You know the one I mean, on the other side of the state road…’

So there you were! He would have liked to say, ‘If that passage was so secret, how come even a porter who worked at the mill knew about it?’ But he’d finished the bean soup and so he decided to compliment the signora on her cooking instead and to order a piece of frittata with a bit of salad.

After dinner he took a little stroll around the city. All in all, his first contacts – his chats with the museum security guard and the trattoria owner – had been very agreeable, making him feel at home in this new context, among people that he’d heard were usually not very welcoming to strangers, despite the steady stream of tourists they must have become accustomed to.

It was completely dark and there wasn’t a soul on the streets by the time Fabrizio made his way back to the museum gates. He turned off the alarm, let himself in with a key and then activated the alarm again as soon as he was inside. The time had come to meet the lad of bronze who was waiting for him in the exhibition hall. He went up the stairs, took a chair, switched on the light and sat down in front of the statue. Finally.

To Fabrizio’s eyes, it was the most remarkable thing he’d ever seen. The choice of the subject was incredibly original, the crafting extraordinary. The aura that emanated from the boy was intense and emotional, capturing all the poetry of Vincenzo Gemito’s street urchins, the expressive punch of a Picasso, the exasperated fragility of Giacometti’s most inspired bronzes. This heartfelt vision was of such creative power that it left Fabrizio feeling awed and almost daunted.

It was the tender image of a sad, slight little boy. His frail body was exaggeratedly long, while his minute face had a melancholy look that couldn’t entirely mask a hint of natural light-heartedness, cut down too soon by death. A child whose loss must have left his parents in the most unthinkable despair, if they had appealed to such a sublime artist to portray him so realistically, capturing his personality, his youth, perhaps even signs of the illness that had spirited him away…

When the bell tolled from the tower of the nearby Sant’Agostino church, Fabrizio realized that almost an hour had gone by. He got to his feet and began to set up his camera equipment.

The photographs available on file had been wholly inadequate. Fabrizio felt the need to explore each and every detail of the statue with his lens; perhaps he’d discover aspects of the casting that the experts hadn’t picked up on. He was reminded of the words of his professor and mentor, Gaetano Orlandi, who used to say that the best place to excavate in Italy was in the museums and storehouses of the National Antiquities Service.

It took him hours to set up the lights, then study the angles and shots. He took about ten rolls of slide film and the same number of photos using a digital camera so that he could analyse the images electronically. Just as he was finishing up on the figure’s face, head and neck, the phone rang out in the hall. Fabrizio checked his watch: it was after one a.m. Evidently a wrong number. Who could be calling a museum at that hour? He went back to his work, intent on finishing despite his fatigue, but the telephone distracted him again only a few minutes later.

He went to pick up the receiver and began to say, ‘Listen, you’ve got the wrong-’

But a woman’s voice with a curt, peremptory tone cut him short. ‘Leave the boy alone!’ This was followed by the click of her hanging up.

Fabrizio replaced the receiver mechanically and wiped a hand over his sweaty brow. Was he so tired that he was hearing things? No one knew anything about his research, except for the director himself and Mario, but the security guard wouldn’t have had a very clear idea of what it was all about anyway. Fabrizio didn’t know what to think, and the impossibility of instantly finding a reasonable explanation behind this apparently inexplicable event annoyed him tremendously.

Could there be a rational explanation? Might one of the library clerks have heard about his research and spoken about him to some impressionable soul, one of those fanatics who live on pseudo-scientific New Age hype? Obsessed with the pyramids or – why not? – with the Etruscans. After all, the Etruscans were second only to the Egyptians in their legendary fascination with the afterlife, and famous for being soothsayers and sorcerers.

The person on the phone must have seen the light filtering from the windows of the second floor of the museum, and that meant they must be somewhere in the immediate vicinity. Without opening the shutters, he sneaked a look outside to check the buildings opposite the museum and to the sides, but he didn’t spot anything worthy of attention.

As he was scanning the vicinity, another sound – even more alarming than the phone ringing and the creepy voice of the woman warning him off – broke through the still of night, invading his ears and even more so his imagination: the long, deep howling of an animal, a fierce cry of challenge and pain. A wolf. In the centre of the city of Volterra.

‘Christ!’ Fabrizio burst out. ‘What the hell is happening?’

For the first time in his adult life, the panic and fear he’d felt as a child came flooding back, the sheer terror that had kept him nailed to his bed when the screeching of an owl tore through the night air outside the mountain house where he’d lived then.

A wolf? Wait. Really, though, why not? Fabrizio remembered reading somewhere that recent environmental protection policies had allowed certain predators to extend their territory along the Apennines, all over Italy. But his logic was shattered to pieces as he heard the ear-splitting howl echo again, closer this time, more threatening. It trailed off finally into an agonized rattle.

He gathered up his things, turned out all the lights, one after another, and rushed down the stairs towards the lobby. He set the alarm and went out into the street, triple-locking the door behind him. As he walked away, he thought he could hear the phone ringing again inside, shrill and persistent, but there was no way he was going back in. There was no trusting where his imagination would take him.

His car was parked in a little square not far from the museum, but the distance on foot down the silent, deserted streets that separated him from his ride home seemed never-ending. How could no one have heard? Why weren’t people turning on their lights, looking out of their windows? He stopped more than once, sure he’d heard a pawing sound behind him, or even an uneven panting. Each time he spun around, then picked up his pace. When he reached the square, his car was not there. A surge of panic sent him running from one street to the next, this way and that, with his heart in his mouth and his breath coming in short gasps. He could hear that atrocious howling echoing against every wall, from every archway, at the end of every street.

He forced himself to stop and to control the panic that was overwhelming him. It took all his willpower to lean against a wall, take a deep breath and make an effort to think clearly. He realized that he must have parked his car in another spot and he tried to remember his movements with some degree of clarity. He started walking and, as his thoughts eventually sorted themselves out, he found himself in the square where he had actually parked his car. He got in, started it up and began driving fast towards the farmhouse in Val d’Era. He was starting to feel that living in such an isolated place, buried, practically, by the vegetation all around it, was perhaps not the ideal choice for his stay in Volterra. He let himself in quickly, shut the door behind him and bolted it.