The Ballet of Dr Caligari
Page 30
As I emerged from the Palazzo, the Via del Corso was almost deserted. A lambretta buzzed past carrying an ecstatic young couple to an unknown destination. I caught sight of a small, shadowy figure in a doorway opposite. It seemed to be watching me. There were no taxis about, so I began to walk hurriedly away. The figure detached itself from the doorway and started to follow me. It was an elderly woman all in black. Why was I so frightened? I stopped and faced my pursuer. It was Vittoria, the Contessa’s mother. Her deep black eyes stared at me with concentrated venom.
‘Why do you run away from me, young man?’
‘I did not know who you were. What are you doing here?’
‘I ask the questions and I ask what you are doing.’
‘I had business with the Prince.’
‘What business with my brother? What is that you are carrying?’
She suddenly seized hold of the canvas and her grip was so remarkably tenacious that I decided to let it go. Impatiently, she tore away the covering blanket to be confronted by one of Massimo’s most lurid canvases. The Prince had disguised the Titian expertly.
Vittoria sprang back with disgust, dropping the canvas which I picked up hurriedly.
‘Ah! Merda del diabolo! What are you doing with that excrement of Massimo’s? Did he give it to you? You artists are all the same! Are you omosessuale as well?’
‘Is that any of your business?’
‘I warn you. Do not go back there.’ She pointed a withered finger at the Palazzo. ‘There is treachery; there is death in my brother’s house. I smell it. I smell blood.’ Evidently the Prince was not the only one in his family with a taste for melodrama.
Just then a lone taxi was passing. I hailed it and got in, leaving a small black figure staring at me balefully from the pavement.
By the following evening I was on a plane back to London, and my canvases, including Massimo’s daub, passed through customs without difficulty. Then I waited. The Prince had told me that he would call me in a few days time when he arrived in London, but no call came. It was only the chance reading of an article in The Times that told me what had happened.
Three days after my departure for London with the Titian the Prince had died of septicaemia after a fall in his Palazzo. His ‘secretary’ Massimo had been present at his death, and having been declared the heir to his estate in the Prince’s will, there was naturally some controversy. The Prince’s sister, Vittoria, made wild accusations, but nothing irregular could be proved. One picturesque detail in the article caught my eye: the Prince had died clutching a dark red rose, the emblem of a branch of his family, the Valerii.
As for the Titian, I have it still. Neither the Prince’s heir, nor any member of his family has asked after it; and there is no possibility of selling the thing without awkward questions being asked. It is a secret possession of mine which, down the years, I have occasionally shown to a few trusted friends. I am ashamed to say that I have always represented it to them as my own work, and they have all declared it to be an extremely competent copy of an undoubted masterpiece. In a way, I suppose it is. All the same, there remains something wrong about the rose.
AUTHOR’S NOTE
In 2009 Ex Occidente Press published a collection of my stories and some other pieces called Madder Mysteries. It is now impossible to get hold of and, even at the time of publication, many people experienced difficulties in obtaining a copy. The reasons for this were many, various, and mostly dull so I won’t go into them. Madder Mysteries itself, I must admit, was a bit of a rag bag, containing both fiction and non-fiction, and a few whimsical fragments, but there were some stories in it which are worth preserving. One of them is the completion of M.R. James’s unfinished story ‘The Game of Bear’. I obtained permission in person from James’s great nephew Mr Nicholas Rhodes James to publish the result. Finding that the stories deserving of salvage were not sufficient to make a decent book I decided to add to them a number of stories which I have written since the publication of my last Tartarus collection, Holidays from Hell. Of these ‘The Ballet of Dr Caligari’ has been published in The Madness of Dr Caligari (Fedogan & Bremer 2016), ‘Love and Death’ in The Scarlet Soul, Stories for Dorian Gray (Swan River Press 2018), ‘The Vampyre Trap’ in Murder Ballads (Egaeus Press 2017); a version of ‘The Final Stage’ entitled ‘An Actor’s Nightmare’ featured in Nightmare’s Realm (Dark Regions Press 2017), and ‘The Endless Corridor’ was in the journal Dark Discoveries #37 (JournalStone 2017).
Contents
title page
Copyright Information
CONTENTS
A DONKEY AT THE MYSTERIES
THE HEAD
TAWNY
THE DEVIL’S FUNERAL
BASKERVILLE’S MIDGETS
THE GAME OF BEAR
THE FINAL STAGE
THE ENDLESS CORRIDOR
THE VAMPYRE TRAP
THE BALLET OF DR CALIGARI
LOVE AND DEATH
PORSON’S PIECE
LADY WITH A ROSE
AUTHOR’S NOTE