Valerio Manfredi: The Ancient Curse

Fabrizio couldn’t get over the strangeness of the situation. He walked up to the first sarcophagus and ran his hand lightly along its edge. What he discovered in doing so was even more mystifying: it was sculpted in a single block of stone, almost certainly solid, which meant that there was no one buried inside. A cenotaph: a symbolic tomb. This was rare, for Etruscan times; in fact, it was possibly the only one of its kind. Fabrizio had never seen, or read about, anything like it. He carefully inspected the sides and the back but could find no sign of a separation between the coffin and its cover. What was also very unusual was the absence of a name or marking of any kind.

He turned towards the second sarcophagus and was struck by how the floor around it was scored by deep, irregular gouges, as if iron claws had scratched away at that smooth finish. His mind was flooded with fangs and claws, with that ferocious howl ripping through the night.

Fabrizio forced himself to start taking measurements and to draw the layout of the tomb with the various objects it contained. But his eyes kept going back to that rough sarcophagus towering there in front of him and he dreaded the moment of coming to terms with what was inside.

He came out at one o’clock to have a sandwich and get a breath of fresh air. He lingered in the hopes that Francesca would turn up. He wanted her to be there when he opened the coffin. The carabinieri had a little camp stove for making coffee and Fabrizio joined them in a cup before going back in.

The workers had already been to fetch the necessary equipment. They placed one wooden horse in front of and one behind the sarcophagus, set a beam across them and hung an electric winch connected to a power generator from the beam. The cable hanging from the winch ended with a ring, on to which four more cables were attached. Each of these ended in a specially shaped aluminium bracket, which was applied to one of the four corners of the lid.

Fabrizio made sure there were no cracks in the stone and then, at exactly three fifteen, threw the switch that powered the winch at its slowest speed. The four steel cables pulled straight at the same moment and slowly lifted off the lid without making the slightest noise.

At first the inside of the big coffin was so dark that Fabrizio couldn’t make out what it contained. But this time he got a good whiff of the scent of millennia: the smell of must and mould, of damp stone and dust. An indefinable odour whose diverse components had had all the time they needed to decompose and recombine a thousand times with the passage of the seasons, of the centuries. The work of ages, of heat and cold, and above all of silence.

He switched on his torch and shone it inside. The contents emerged all at once from the dark, freezing the blood in his veins and cutting his breath short. He had expected to find an urn with the ashes of the deceased, along with all the usual objects that accompanied the funeral rites. What met his eyes instead was a scene of horror, covered only by the thin veil of dust that had fallen from the inside of the sandstone lid over the centuries.

He saw a tangle of human and animal bones, all jumbled up and practically fused together by a fury and ferocity beyond any limit. Enormous clawed paws, a disarticulated jaw with monstrous fangs still attached, and a human body that was barely recognizable. Shattered bones, mangled limbs, a crushed skull whose top dental arch yawned wide in a scream of pain that could no longer be heard but was still present, desperate, immortal. Both the coffin walls and the inner lid were scored with the deep abrasions that Fabrizio had seen on the ground outside.

There was no doubt about what had happened here. A human being had been buried together with a wild animal that had torn the body apart and then tried to writhe and claw its way out of that narrow stone prison before dying of suffocation. Fragments of coarse cloth were still sticking here and there to what was left of the man’s head, and this detail left no doubt in Fabrizio’ mind as to the horrifying ritual that had brought about this person’ death.

He pulled back from the coffin, his face pale and beaded with cold sweat, murmuring, ‘Oh, Christ my God. A… a Phersu… ’

FRANCESCA ARRIVED at about five and saw that the workers had already loaded a sarcophagus on to the pickup and were removing the winch cables. It was a striking alabaster cenotaph coffin with the figure of a woman reclining on a triclinium. She saw that the door to the tomb was open and had been entered. Fabrizio was leaning into the other roughly hewn sarcophagus with his head and arms practically inside.

He straightened up when he heard her footsteps and she was shocked by the expression on his face. He looked as if he had been to hell and back.

‘What’s happened? You look horrible.’

‘I’m a little tired,’ he said, motioning for her to join him. ‘Look at this. Have you ever seen anything like it?’

Francesca leaned over the open coffin and her smile disappeared instantly. ‘Good God. It’s a…’

‘A Phersu… I think it’s a Phersu. Look at the skull. There are still shreds of the sack they closed his head in.’

‘This is a sensational discovery! I would say that this is the first time archaeological evidence of this ritual has ever been found. Up until now, we’ve only seen it represented in the iconography.’

‘I’m sure you’re right, Francesca, but I don’t feel satisfied or excited. When I opened the lid and saw this scene I thought I was having a heart attack. It felt like it had just happened.’

Well, that’s only natural,’ said Francesca. ‘The same thing happened to me when I excavated the harbour at Herculaneum with Contini. Those scenes of death and desperation seemed crystallized in time and were still laden with human drama… at least for me.’

‘What do you think this poor wretch did to deserve such an end?’

‘Come on, you know he was already dead when they shut him in the sarcophagus.’

‘All right, let’s say he was dead, but what led up to this? I mean, have you seen that animal inside? I’ve… never seen anything like it.’

Francesca leaned into the coffin again to peer inside, more apprehensively this time. ‘What do you think it is?’

‘It looks like a dog, but-’

‘Yeah, it does, but its snout is so long and it’s… enormous. Did they have dogs that big back then?’

‘Don’t ask me. I have no idea. I want to contact a friend of mine in Bologna tonight. Sonia Vitali is a palaeozoologist. I’ll email her a picture. Hopefully she’ll be free to come here and have a look at these bones.’

‘What do you have left to do here?’

‘I’ve photographed everything, both on film and digitally, and I’ve recorded the position of every find inside the coffin. I just have to remove the remains.’

‘Does Balestra know?’

‘I called him at the office and on his mobile phone, but he’s not answering. Have you seen him?’

‘I haven’t been at the museum today. But it seems strange you can’t reach him. I think he’d like to see the finds in their original positions.’

‘I’m sure he would, but both the Finanza and the carabinieri are telling me they can’t ensure continuing surveillance. That’s why I’ve had the alabaster sarcophagus loaded on to the truck and now I have to remove everything else. I can’t leave things here unguarded. Not that there’s anything precious, but you never know…’

‘Then I’ll help you,’ said Francesca.

She set to work with Fabrizio, picking out every little fragment, every last bit of that tragedy, and packaging it all up into plastic boxes. They put little yellow tags on each with the wording: ‘Rovaio tomb. Sarcophagus A. Human and animal remains.’ This formulation was as vague and confused as the situation that had presented itself once the coffin was opened.