‘My sight’s coming back, thank God.’
‘You didn’t get the full flash. Vane couldn’t lift up the cloth over his head, because you stuck your knife into it. That’s what saved you.’
‘What do you mean he couldn’t lift it up? Eleanor, that isn’t a real man, and that isn’t a real cloth. That’s a painting.’
‘Well, it is and it isn’t.’
She was silent for a while, as if she were trying to decide what to say to him. In the end, Jim said, ‘You know a whole lot more about this than you’re telling me, don’t you?’
‘I only know what Raymond Boschetto told me.’
‘You mean Vinnie Boschetto’s uncle? I thought you hardly ever spoke to him.’
Eleanor drew back her hair with her hand. ‘I didn’t. But the only reason I’m living in this building is because they wanted me close at hand, if Raymond ever needed my help. You don’t think that I could possibly afford to live here if they hadn’t?’
‘Who are “they”?’
‘The Benandanti. The people who own this building.’
‘So why would Raymond Boschetto have needed your help?’
‘Because I’m a sensitive. Because I can communicate with presences.’
‘Any presence in particular?’
‘Of course. Robert H. Vane. Raymond Boschetto was trying to find a way to do what you’ve been trying to do.’ She nodded her head toward the painting. ‘Get rid of that.’
‘I see. Obviously he didn’t succeed.’
‘No,’ said Eleanor. ‘Raymond tried to dispose of the painting dozens of times. He told me that he took it on the Mauretania once and threw it into the ocean, mid-Atlantic. Another time he drove it out to Death Valley. But it always came back. However, he did discover how to keep Vane’s spirit trapped inside it, so that Vane couldn’t get out.’
‘How did he do that?’
‘He wouldn’t tell me. He couldn’t trust anybody, even me. He thought that if I knew, Vane’s spirit might enter my mind and persuade me to set him free. Before he found out how to keep him trapped, Vane’s spirit was always climbing out of the painting, especially at night – the way he climbed out last night and set fire to your bed.’
‘Why didn’t you tell me this before? For Christ’s sake, I could have been cremated in my sleep! I could have been nothing but ashes and bones and –’ he held up his right hand – ‘my old fraternity ring!’
‘I’m sorry,’ said Eleanor. ‘We knew that your ability to sense the presence of evil spirits was very highly developed. We guessed, rightly, that the painting would disturb you, and that you would want to get rid of it as soon as you could. But wrongly, we guessed that you might have the strength to dispose of it forever. You can understand that we didn’t want to tell you any more than we had to, in case you came under Robert H. Vane’s influence, and decided to help him.’
‘Help him? Help him to do what?’
Eleanor didn’t answer. Jim closed his eyes and pressed his fingertips against his eyelids. He could still see orange blodges, as well as a dancing pattern of green diamonds.
‘Are you all right?’ Eleanor asked him.
‘Sure. I think so. Half-barbecued and half-blind, but I’ll survive.’
‘Jim, I can’t tell you very much more. I don’t know very much more.’
‘All right – but how come Vane can still be trapped inside this painting, after all these years? He should be long dead.’
‘Dead, yes. Of course he’s dead. But he’s not at rest.’
‘I don’t get it.’
‘Oh, come on. You must have seen hundreds of wandering souls – people who still have unfinished business in the real world, or who can’t believe that they’re really dead. How many religions believe that you can’t pass over to the other side unless your entire body has been buried or cremated? That’s why some Native American tribes used to cut off their victims’ heads and take them away, isn’t it? So that they could never go to the happy hunting ground.’
‘Robert H. Vane didn’t have his head cut off.’
‘I know. But if you want to find peace when you die, your soul has to be complete, as well as your body. The good side of your soul, and the evil side, too, they have to be together. That’s why Robert H. Vane has never been able to rest. His good side is lying in a cemetery someplace, although we don’t know where. But his dark side is still trapped inside this painting. He carries on doing what he was charged to do, when he was alive, and he won’t hesitate to kill anybody who tries to stop him. He believes that he’s on a divine mission.’
Jim looked up at the painting. His carving knife was still sticking out of Robert H. Vane’s head and casting a triangular shadow, like the pointer on a sundial. ‘So what is this divine mission?’
‘To capture the evil side of people’s souls, so that the world will be a better place.’
‘And who told him to do this?’
‘The Benandanti.’
‘But those are the same people who want him dead.’
Eleanor nodded. ‘They didn’t realize that Vane’s mission would go so disastrously wrong, and that capturing the evil side of people’s souls would cause such death and calamity. They’re desperate to have him destroyed. They’ve been desperate for over a hundred and fifty years.’
Jim picked up his can of beer and took another swallow. He couldn’t take his eyes off the painting. He had found it unsettling from the moment that he had first seen it, but now he found it totally frightening, as if it were a bomb that could explode at any moment.
‘So who are the Benandanti?’ he asked.
‘They’re a secret society. They started off in northern Italy in the fifteenth century, as a fertility cult, worshiping the goddess Diana. Their name means “those who go well” or “good walkers.” What we would call do-gooders. They were always incredibly secretive, and what little we know about them comes from the Inquisition, who tortured the Benandanti because they believed that they were witches.
‘The Inquisition were right, in a way. The Benandanti do use magic. But it’s white magic, and they are sworn to root out evil, no matter where it appears. They wage a never-ending war against the forces of darkness – night after night, week after week, year after year.’
‘I’m amazed I’ve never heard of them before.’
‘They’re a secret society, that’s why, and they don’t exactly advertise themselves. All the same, Jim, they’re the only true guardians of the spirit plane. They make sure that all of us are healthy, and fertile, and prosperous.’
‘All of us? I don’t think so. You’re talking to somebody who suffers from chronic hay fever, has no children, and is practically flat broke.’
Eleanor smiled. ‘You don’t know how bad things could be if the Benandanti weren’t fighting on our side.’
‘So who’s fighting on the other side?’
‘The legions of evil. The Benandanti call them the Malandanti.’
‘And how do the Benandanti fight them? And where?’
‘Usually by leaving their bodies, using astral projection, and hunting down the Malandanti in the shadow planes. The Benandanti can also leave their bodies to have secret meetings, anywhere in the world.’
Jim said, ‘Yes … I’ve done some of that leaving-your-body stuff. Not recommended for anybody who has to get up for work the next morning.’
Eleanor stood up, and came close to him, looking up at the painting. ‘When photography was invented, the Benandanti thought that they found a scientific way to banish evil forever. They would send photographers like Robert H. Vane all around the world, like missionaries, taking pictures of as many people as they possibly could. The silver in the photographic plates would not only reflect whatever evil people had inside them, but once the plate was fixed, the evil would stay there.’
‘And it worked?’
‘Oh, yes,’ said Eleanor. ‘It worked all right. But the Benandanti hadn’t understood that when people have been purged of
all of their evil, they become weak and vulnerable, and they’re no longer willing to protect themselves. All of those Native Americans that Robert H. Vane took pictures of … they died in their thousands, either of sickness, or because they put up absolutely no resistance to rapacious white settlers, or any of their enemies.’
‘The Daguenos, for instance,’ said Jim. ‘For whom Robert H. Vane is still in mourning.’
‘That’s right.’
‘But wait a minute – didn’t the Daguenos attack a white settlement, and murder everybody, and pull their guts out? That wasn’t a very weak and vulnerable thing to do, was it?’
‘That was the other face of the disaster. Yes, everybody who was photographed had the evil taken out of them, and caught on a silver plate. But every image has a life of its own, as you know. Every portrait can see, and think. Some portraits, under some circumstances, can move – especially at night, when those who knew the people in the portraits are dreaming about them.’
Jim sat down again. He had seen photographs moving for himself. Once he had even heard one speak – a single, anguished appeal: ‘Mother!’ He had seen portraits cry, out of sadness, or frustration. It wasn’t hard to imagine what had happened to the portraits on Robert H. Vane’s daguerrotype plates. As darkness fell, they had walked abroad, images of pure evil, but reversed, like negatives. White men with black faces and white eyes, looking to murder, and to burn, and to wreak any kind of havoc they could.
‘What happened to Vane?’ he asked Eleanor.
‘As soon as the Benandanti discovered what was happening, they found him and ordered him to stop taking pictures, which of course he did, although they never told him why. But they didn’t realize that he had taken a self-portrait, and that his own evil image was stored on a daguerrotype plate in his studio, along with all the rest.
‘His good self stopped taking pictures, but every night the evil part of his spirit emerged from his self-portrait, and went out to take more. The more he took, the more he mutated, until he became the creature you saw last night, half-camera and half-man. In those days, in Southern California, people were afraid to go out at night, because there were so many murders and terrible acts of rape and mutilation. What they didn’t realize was that they were being plagued by themselves – their own evil images, from Robert H. Vane’s plates. And, of course, being so good, they were defenseless.
‘At last one senior Benandanti missionary realized what was happening, and the Benandanti sent their agents to hunt for Vane’s evil spirit. They found several of his secret studios and storehouses, and they smashed hundreds of daguerrotypes. But Vane took out insurance against his own daguerrotype being broken. He went to the best artist he could find – Gordon Shelby Welkin – and paid him a fortune to paint this portrait. On a thin sheet of silver-plated copper, which is why this painting is so heavy.
‘In his diary, Welkin wrote that he was ordered by Vane to grind up the dried caul that Vane had been born with, and mix it into his oils.’
‘His caul?’
‘Yes – the Benandanti set great store by the magical powers of a baby’s caul. Most of them carry their cauls around their necks, in a hollow tube, for the rest of their lives. I don’t know if I believe it myself, but I can’t think what else might account for this painting being indestructible, and un-sellable, and why it always comes back to this apartment.’
Jim was so angry he could hardly breathe. ‘Vinnie must have known about this.’
‘Yes,’ said Eleanor. ‘I suppose he must have done. But I never knew anything about Raymond’s family. The Benandanti never tell you more than you need to know, and most of the time they tell you very much less.’
‘Goddamn it, no wonder Vinnie let me rent the place so goddamned cheap! And no wonder he asked me if I was managing to sleep OK. “Haven’t been disturbed by any hunchbacks, have you, Jim, with legs like tripods? No-o-o? That’s a relief!”’
Eleanor caught hold of his sleeve. ‘I swear to you, Jim, all I know is that the day after Raymond died, I had a phone call from the Benandanti telling me that they were urgently looking for somebody to take his place, but meanwhile I should be extra watchful.’
‘I see. They were looking for somebody to take his place, were they? Somebody with psychic abilities, who could take on Robert H. Vane and stop him from turning the world into negative hell, but somebody that no one would miss if anything went badly wrong? Who better than good old Jim Rook?’
‘Jim, when they told me you were moving in, you’ve no idea how relieved they were. People of your abilities – well, they’re one in ten million.’
Jim didn’t know what to say. What had seemed to be a bargain had turned out instead to be a death trap; and the people who had pretended to be friends had turned out to be vipers. He could have been incinerated last night. He might have been incinerated only a few minutes ago, if he hadn’t been lucky enough to pin down the cloth that covered Robert H. Vane’s head. He could be lying here now, on the rug, nothing more than a heap of gray ashes, a ribcage, and a skull.
‘I think you’d better leave,’ he told Eleanor.
‘Jim … I promise you … I know the Benandanti – I trust them. If they could have thought of any other way …’
‘They didn’t even ask me! They didn’t even call me up and say, “oh, excuse us, we’re the Benandanti and we happen to have an oil painting which can reduce a human being to cigar ash in five seconds flat, and would you mind keeping an eye on it for us?”’
‘You would have refused, that’s why.’
‘Too damn right I would have refused!’
‘Even if you knew what Vane is capable of doing whenever he gets out? Jim, he goes around capturing the evil in people’s souls, anybody he can find, and he stores them up in their hundreds, on his silver plates, so that one day you won’t be safe anywhere, day or night, because the world will be overrun with the negative images of people’s spirits, their evil selves, and their good selves will be far too weak to stop them.’
Jim ran his hand through his prickly hair. ‘I’m sorry, Eleanor. I like you, and I can understand what you’re saying, but no, this isn’t a job for me. I’ve had enough bad experiences with evil spirits for one lifetime, believe me, and after what happened to me in DC …’
An appalling thought occurred to him. Supposing the Benandanti had heard about his psychic abilities while he was still in Washington, working for the federal department of education? How would they have made sure that he return to Los Angeles, and to West Grove Community College? Only two days after that terrible incident in Washington, while he was still in shock, his phone had rung and it was Seymour Wallis from the West Grove board of governors. Seymour Wallis – white-bearded, avuncular, reassuring. ‘We don’t know how you’re making out in DC, Jim, but your old job with Special Class II just became vacant … is there a small chance that you might be interested?’
He said to Eleanor, ‘I’ll be staying someplace else tonight, and tomorrow morning I’ll be packing up my stuff and leaving.’
She took hold of both of his hands, her silver rings digging into his fingers. ‘Jim, I’m so sorry. Please don’t go. I don’t know what’s going to happen if you do. It won’t be like The Night of the Living Dead – it’ll be far worse than that. The negative people are absolute evil … they’re worse than vampires, and they multiply as fast as Vane can take their pictures. Crowd scenes, hundreds at a time.’
The phone rang. Jim pulled himself free from Eleanor and went over to pick it up.
‘Jim? It’s Julia Fox. Listen, I have something terribly embarrassing to tell you. We have such high security at the auction house. We’ve had Rembrandts here without any incident. But somehow your Welkin has gone AWOL.’
‘Don’t worry about it, Julia. Like you said, you probably couldn’t have knocked it down for very much.’
‘All the same, we’ve informed the police, and they’ll probably want to come talk to you.’
‘OK, Julia, thanks.’
He hung up. Eleanor was standing with her arms by her sides, watching him.
‘The auction house,’ he said. ‘They think that somebody’s stolen my painting.’
‘Jim,’ Eleanor pleaded.
‘No. I wouldn’t have moved here if Vinnie hadn’t lied to me, and I wouldn’t have stayed here if you hadn’t compounded that lie. “I sense two presences.” Do me a favor.’
‘Oh, those two presences are here all right. They’re Raymond’s mother and father.’
‘Really? Thanks for telling me.’
‘Please, listen. Raymond’s mother and father were attending a family wedding – one of Raymond’s cousins – when Robert H. Vane appeared and took their pictures. After that their evil selves used to come here night after night, beating at the door, until one day Raymond managed to find out where their daguerrotypes were hidden, and destroyed them. Now all that’s left is their good selves, which stayed here after they died – and always will, probably, until they knock the building down.’
Jim said, ‘It’s no use, Eleanor. Nothing can persuade me to stay here. Nothing.’
They gathered around the graves at Rolling Hills cemetery, over a hundred of them – families, friends, fellow students and the media. It was a humid morning, and the sky was a strange reddish color, as if it had been filmed through a strawberry filter, or as if something freakish were about to happen.
Bobby’s and Sara’s families stood together, dabbing their eyes. Dr Ehrlichman gave a speech about promising lives cut short – the same speech that he always gave when West Grove lost one of its students, whether they had died in an auto wreck, or cut their wrists, or overdosed on smack.
‘Who can predict what they might have been … what they might have achieved? Who can tell where the highway of fate might have guided their footsteps?’
At the end, Jim stepped forward. He was feeling tired and strained, and the burned prickles of his hair were stuck to his forehead with perspiration, but he had promised to say a few words on behalf of Special Class II.
‘I didn’t personally know Bobby or Sara, but I know what their fellow students thought of them, how much they loved and respected them, and how much they’re going to miss them. Here’s a poem that I was going to read in class next week, and which we were all going to discuss. I can’t say what Bobby and Sara would have thought about it, but I think it’s very appropriate for their passing. “Farewell” by Henry Thompson:
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