The Millennium Express: The Collected Stories of Robert Silverberg, Volume Nine Read online

  Gardiner shook his head. “Ghosts?” he muttered, roaming the edges of the building, scuffing at the mounded straw. That door into the unknown opening again. This damned island, he thought: level after level of superstition, evil, and madness. You were forever toppling down through the detritus of all its many occupiers to the jolting incomprehensibilities beneath.

  He was no good at dealing with such stuff. It forever amazed him when he came running up against some apparently rational person’s firmly held belief in the irrational, the impossible, the altogether inexplicable. For Gardiner there was nothing inexplicable, only phenomena that had not yet been properly explained; anything that seemed to be truly and eternally inexplicable was, he suspected, something that had either been badly misinterpreted or had simply never in fact occurred.

  He prodded and kicked at the ground along the perimeter of the building with the tip of Gino’s boot. “Who was the lucky boy?” he asked, after a time, amazed at himself for keeping the distasteful subject open.

  “Does it matter?” she said. “His name was Calogero. He is dead now.”

  “I’m sorry,” said Gardiner automatically. He continued to kick and scuff. Then came a surprise. “Hold on. What’s this?”

  A forehead of glistening tile was showing along the wall, just at the debris line. He dropped to his knees and scrabbled at it, hurling handfuls of sand behind him. Other things came into view. Eyebrows. Eyes. A serene face, nearly complete; a halo. He trembled. There was a mosaic here after all.

  “It is not easy to believe,” she said, as they made their way wearily back to town at dusk after a long breathless afternoon of clearing away debris. “All those years, and those beautiful things on the wall, and no one ever thought to look under the dirt, until you.”

  Gardiner barely heard her. He was lost in a feverish dream of academic triumph. There would be articles in the journals; there would be a book; he would waltz to his doctorate. The mosaics were not of the first rank, hardly that, but they were undeniably late-Byzantine, a continuous band of them that circled the walls just below the surface of the intrusive fill, saints and pilgrims and Biblical figures in bright, intense reds and greens and golds and blacks. The tesserae, the bits of colored glass out of which the mosaic patterns were fashioned, were large and crude and not always perfectly fitted together—this was not Monreale or Cefalu, not Ravenna’s San Vitale, not the Keriye Djami in Istanbul—and the figures were awkward and often poorly arranged; but there was a purity about them, an innocence, that made them very beautiful in their own less sophisticated manner.

  Schemes, plans, were swiftly unfolding now. He would use his meager funds to hire workmen in town; he would clear out all the fill; he would photograph, he would analyze, he would compare and contrast, he would publish, he would publish, he would publish—

  As he and Serafina entered the town’s central piazza Gardiner saw that the entire population had turned out, making the nightly promenade, families moving in clustered groups, old men walking arm in arm, young couples holding hands. Some glanced at them, smiling. It seemed to him that everyone was remarking knowingly on their dusty, sweaty look, speculating vividly, lubriciously, on what they had been up to all afternoon in the church across the gorge. And not one with any idea of the truth.

  Gardiner had been thinking of inviting her into the trattoria for a celebratory dinner, candles and a fine bottle of red Regeleali riserva with the meal, and then, perhaps, a night of glorious celebratory delights upstairs: all the way back, he had seen that as a natural and inevitable sequel to the day’s triumphant events. But here in town he perceived instantly the impossibility of any such thing. Sweep her grandly into the inn with everybody watching, his carnal notions as manifest to all as if he had exposed himself in the street, and she not to be seen again until morning? Hardly. Whatever destiny awaited him with this woman, and Gardiner was convinced now that some sort of destiny did, it would not be consummated in this tiny and hermetic village. Not tonight, at any rate, virtually in public, as it were.

  She appeared to have figured all that out long before him. “Well,” she said, hardly pausing a moment outside the little inn before turning away, “I congratulate you on your good fortune. I am happy to have been of service.” She touched the tips of her fingers to his, and then she was gone, walking in long strides across the piazza to greet a pair of hatchet-faced old women who were clad in the traditional somber costume of an earlier era.

  There was no bath in his room, only a washbasin. Gardiner stripped, quickly splashed himself clean, lay down on the creaking bed to reflect on the day’s achievement and perhaps enjoy a little repose. Instantly he was asleep. When he woke, with a start, it was past ten. He dressed hastily. As he descended the stairs, he met someone coming upward, a sturdy-looking, black-bearded, youngish man in a priest’s black robe, who smiled and saluted him when they passed each other. So the albergo had acquired a new guest during the day. Two guests at once: a booming tourist season for them, Gardiner supposed.

  The padrona was in the dining room, reading a newspaper. She seemed untroubled by his tardiness, and immediately went about putting together dinner for him, pasta with sardines, some roasted pork, a carafe of the red vino di casa. “It was a good day for you?” she asked.

  “Fine. Splendid.” His glow could leave no doubt.

  “You stay here tomorrow?”

  “Certainly. Even past tomorrow.”

  This time, when he settled down on his bed again after dinner, sleep was impossible for a long time. He stared up at the low fly-specked ceiling and saw mosaics on the screen of his wearied mind, stylized mosaic figures, angels, patriarchs, sheep, frolicking dogs. It was too good to be true: much too good. Perhaps he had imagined the whole thing. The heat, the wine, the enchanting proximity of Serafina—

  No. No. No. No. They had really been there. His discovery, his mosaics. He had touched them with his own hands. Felt their smooth shining surfaces.

  He slept, finally. It was a night of strange frightening dreams, masked figures dancing around him as he lay strapped to a smoldering pyre in the middle of the piazza.

  At nine he awakened, breakfasted downstairs on cheese and figs and rolls, and peered out into the town square, which was utterly empty except for a couple of elderly dogs. He had no idea where Serafina was and felt uncomfortable about asking; and in any case he and she had made no arrangements for today. He equipped himself with his hat, his jacket, and Gino’s ponderous boots, and tucked a bottle of wine from the display on the dining room table into his backpack, along with enough rolls and cheese and fruit to last him through lunch, and, armed with flashlight, notebook, camera, went capering off alone toward the ravine.

  He dug all morning, using as his shovel a slab of gray slate that was lying in the clearing outside the church. As the layer of loose fill retreated, and he laid bare more and more of the band of mosaic ornament that rimmed the walls, Gardiner grew increasingly excited by his find. The work was on the crude side, yes, but it had a raw power that marked it as an important stylistic mode in its own right. The background in particular was an intense bluish-white, giving the newly exposed parts of the wall a fierce brilliance that flamed wondrously as the sun came slanting occasionally in through the narrow windows and the cracks in the dome, fading when it moved along. Each moment of brightness was the occasion for a hasty flurry of photographs, and soon all his film was gone. It was a giddy, magical few hours.

  He postulated some tenth or eleventh-century craftsman traveling down from Palermo, perhaps to do a job of interior decoration at some baron’s palazzo along the island’s south shore, being inveigled en route into spending a few weeks touching up this little chapel. And really getting into it, seeing it as an opportunity to experiment with an individual style of work, perhaps slipping into a little romantic entanglement with one of the town girls that gave him motivation to linger a little while longer, now a real labor of love, so that months went by, maybe even a year or two of solitary toil
, preparing the little colored cubes and painstakingly mortaring them into place, his own private masterpiece. All too soon to be forgotten, the building allowed to go derelict, a habitation for donkeys, the brilliant mosaics covered in time by an accretion of wind-blown rubble many feet deep.

  There was more than a thesis to be had here. There was an entire scholarly reputation.

  At midday, unable to move another molecule of dirt, Gardiner slipped outside into the stupefying heat for his wine and cheese. As soon as he had finished, sleep came over him, in an instant, as though a thick velvet curtain had been dropped on him.

  Awakening just as instantly some ninety minutes later, he went back into the church and beheld something so bewildering that his mind could not at first encompass it, and he thought he might still be dreaming. But he knew that he had to be awake. The evidence of physical sensation was compelling. The heavy, shimmering, almost tangible air, the penetrating heat, the myriad of musty pungent smells left behind by vanished centuries: all of that was too vividly real.

  And the mosaics had undergone a bizarre transformation. The saints had grown leering faces with forked tongues, and their haloes glowed and pulsated with a neon fury. The peasants tending their flocks had been rearranged into obscene configurations, and looked back jeeringly over their shoulders at him while buggering bat-winged monstrosities. Placid sheep and bounding dogs had been replaced by grotesque reptilian horrors. Colors everywhere clashed garishly.

  Impossible.

  Impossible.

  There was no conceivable explanation for this. Gardiner was shaken, stunned. He felt physically ill. A wild vertigo assailed him. Numbed, half dazed, his heart racing wildly, he backed out of the building, cautiously returned, looked again. Monsters, nightmares, abominations. Frightful sights, all. But what frightened him more than the ghastliness on the walls was the feeling of utter destabilization that whirled through him, the sense that his mind had lost its moorings. He had never experienced any kind of dislocation like this. Never.

  He fought himself into calmness. It must be the heat, Gardiner told himself carefully. He had to be hallucinating. His photographs would show the truth.

  With unsteady hands he lifted his camera, remembering only after the shutter’s first click that he had used up all his film. He shrugged. For a long moment he stood staring at the hideous things on the walls.

  All I need now, he thought, is for one of them to wink at me.

  All I need—

  Abruptly all his hard-won calmness dissolved and something close to panic overcame him.

  Turning, he fled down the side of the gorge, ran with superhuman energy up the far side into town, arriving panting and dizzied, and found Serafina on the porch of her grandparents’ decrepit old stone house behind the post office. “Come with me,” he said. “The mosaics—I was just there, and they looked all changed. You’ve got to come and tell me it isn’t so.”

  “Changed?”

  “Into something horrible. Monsters and demons all over the wall. I couldn’t believe it.”

  “Ah,” she said, smiling amiably, a calm knowing smile as old as Zeus. “So the ghosts are at work.”

  Gardiner felt a shiver run along his back. The ghosts, again.

  “It was the ghosts, yes,” he said harshly. “Or the heat making me crazy. Or something I ate. Whatever it is, you’ve got to go back there with me. To check those mosaics out with your own eyes. I need to prove to myself that I didn’t actually see what I saw. Will you come? Right now?”

  She hesitated only a beat. “Yes,” she said, still looking more amused than anything else. “Of course.”

  This time he led the way. It was the hottest part of the afternoon; but Gardiner was in the grip of a crazy adrenaline surge, and moved so quickly that Serafina was hard pressed to match his speed.

  He entered the church first and switched on his flashlight, bracing himself for the worst. But what he saw were the scenes he had uncovered that morning. Benign golden-haloed saints, looking back at him with gazes of sappy medieval sanctity. Smiling dull-eyed shepherds stood amidst their patient sheep. Innocent dogs performed mindless leaps. He was limp with relief.

  Serafina, following him in, glanced around at the mosaics, and said, smiling, “Yes, well, so tell me: where are all these horrible things?”

  Gardiner peered at the walls, baffled.

  “I swear, Serafina, I was absolutely certain that they were there. A completely convincing hallucination, as real as—as real as these walls. The saints had turned into demons. The farm animals had become monsters. The colors—”

  She gave him a queer look. “You drank a whole bottle of wine with your lunch, yes? And slept in the sun. And then you dreamed. Ah, yes, yes, caro, a very bad dream. Which the oh-so-devilish ghosts of this place playfully put into your sleeping mind to perplex you. Look, look, there are no monsters here. It would be a good story if there were, but there are not.—They are very pretty, your mosaics, I think.”

  Yes. Yes, they were. Gentle scenes, lovely, innocuous.

  Perplexed indeed, altogether lost in bewilderment, Gardiner said almost nothing while they trudged back to town. Already that panoply of monsters was becoming unreal to him. But what he could not put aside was his conviction that he had, at least for a moment, truly seen those things with his own sober eyes, though he knew, knew, that it was impossible that he had.

  As they came up the path into the piazza Serafina said, “You should take the Greek priest over to see the church. He will find it a very exciting surprise.”

  “Who?”

  “Father Demetrios. He is Eastern Orthodox, of the Martorana church in Palermo. He is visiting here since yesterday.”

  Gardiner recalled, now, the other guest at the hotel, the black-bearded young priest of the night before.

  An Orthodox priest, though? The Greek rite? All thoughts of ghosts and monsters, and of his own possibly wobbling sanity, fled from Gardiner at once. He was seized by sudden overmastering practical fear. The priest, if he found out about the mosaics, would surely claim the derelict church on behalf of his sect and take control of any scholarly use of the art within it. Gardiner would be shut out, his rights of discovery overridden by the assertion of the higher right of prior ownership.

  “No,” he said. “I’d rather not show the mosaics to anybody just yet.—You haven’t already told him about them, have you?”

  “No,” she said, “of course not.”

  Was she telling the truth? There was something almost petulant about that of course, and something ambivalent about the shake of the head.

  The town square was deserted. The villagers were still enjoying their siesta, the whole town torpid in the late-day heat. Serafina accompanied him as far as the porch of his inn, and lingered there a moment, long enough for him to wonder whether he should invite her upstairs. But even now, with no one to spy on them, it felt somehow inappropriate, even sordid, to make such an overture to her out of the blue. Their frantic jog over to the ruin had hardly been a proper romantic prelude, and his strange hallucination, his babbling account of imagining that he had witnessed a demonic transformation of the mosaics, left him feeling abashed and demeaned now. He offered no invitation.

  “Well, then, ciao, amico. I will be seeing you,” she added formally, and turned away.

  Was that a touch of disappointment in her tone? So it seemed to him, for a moment. But it was too late to call her back. Already, moving swiftly as always, she was halfway across the piazza.

  Gardiner went to his room, rinsed himself perfunctorily, unloaded his camera and buried the roll of film deep in his suitcase. For a long time he sat by his fly-specked window, staring into the square below, pondering many strangenesses. It was half past seven, now; the day was cooling, the townsfolk were coming forth for their pre-dinner stroll.

  Without warning a desperate reckless desire to see the mosaics again, to confirm the reality of them, overcame him. He seized his camera and in a few minutes found himself
once more laboring down the now-familiar path into the gorge.

  In the grayness of early evening he saw what he took to be bats flitting about the little domed church. Brushing impatiently past them, Gardiner marched inside, grim-faced, and cast his flashlight beam on the walls.

  The mosaics were in nightmare mode again. Everything was fangs, claws, tentacles, jutting swollen penises, jagged blurts of discordant color.

  He felt like sobbing. Why did the damned things keep oscillating in this maddening way? Why couldn’t they keep to one form or the other?

  “Serafina!” he howled, as if expecting her to be able to hear him across the canyon. “It’s happened again!”

  This time he had had no wine. The day’s heat had relented. He believed himself to be sane. What explanation could there be for this?

  There was none. He was staring into the abyss of the incomprehensible.

  Waves of nausea went sweeping through him. He was trembling, and his teeth were chattering, which was something he could not remember having experienced ever before, that convulsive spastic movement of his jaws, that terrible eerie clacking of his teeth. He steadied himself with an immense effort. This must be recorded, he thought. Yes. Yes. Aiming his camera at the ghastliest of the designs, Gardiner pressed and pressed again, but the flash attachment would not operate. He had no idea why. Fear gave way to rage. He spat, slapped the camera, pressed once more. Nothing. Fumblingly he took some photos by flashlight illumination alone, knowing they would never come out.