“It’s over,” I said. “She’s finished.”
Chapter 81
Huxley humiliated Alessandra one last time.
When we reached the fifth floor, a sour-looking matron with a suspicious eye steered Alessandra into the side room Huxley had set up for the required pre-test inspection. Alessandra was stripped naked, her clothes inspected for secret pockets or hidden hooks on her sleeves or bodice, then Huxley’s assistant took her time using her fingers to probe every cavity in Alessandra’s body –her mouth, her fica and even her culo.
Lombardi and Renard only received a quick pat down, but Huxley had ordered Archer to give me the works.
“Behind the curtain, Labella,” he barked.
“Why?” I protested.
He sneered. “Afraid we’ll find something?”
He made me take off my jacket, shirt and shoes, turned my pants pockets inside out, and ran his hands up the inside my legs, giving me a shot in the coglioni before telling me to put my clothes back on. I wanted to kill him.
I took my chair against the far wall, next to Lombardi and Renard. Huxley didn’t want us anywhere near Alessandra when the lamp was turned down. Huxley’s short-hand writer was already busy at her desk next to the shuttered and barred window, adjusting the wick on the oil lamp which would provide the room’s only illumination once the sitting started.
When Alessandra shuffled into the room, my heart sank. I could see the fight was gone from her. Farthing led her over to the table and Hardwicke positioned her feet on the electrical plate.
“Don’t lift them off the pad,” he warned her, then he took his seat.
Farthing headed for the door to take his guard position out in the hall. Archer let him out, then locked the door and slipped the key in his pocket.
Huxley grinned. It was the moment he had been waiting for since Ile Ribaud.
“The rope, Mr. Archer.”
Archer reached into his jacket pocket, pulled out a pair of silver cords, and handed them to Huxley who held one up to Alessandra’s face and sneered.
“A first for you, I believe.”
Huxley began tying her right hand to the chair. “Shall we see what miracles you can produce when you’re properly restrained?” He wound the cord tightly around her wrist a half dozen times, and finished it off with a complicated knot. “A warning, Signora. Pulling against it will only make the rope tighter.”
I could see the rising panic in Alessandra’s eyes as Archer handed Huxley the second rope. Huxley took his time fastening the line around her left wrist. Alessandra started to tremble, and began to tug at the ropes.
Huxley paused, annoyed. “Shall we proceed?”
Alessandra took a deep breath, then nodded her head and shut her eyes tight. Huxley returned to the task, carefully checking each loop for slack, then gave the binding one last yank, slipped into his seat at the end of the table, and Archer turned off the overhead electric light.
In the flickering flame of the oil lamp, I could see Alessandra shaking now. Her breaths were becoming sharper, quicker, shallower. Suddenly, Alessandra stopped and drew back, as if surprised. Her eyes were locked shut, but she was looking at something.
“No… No!”
Archer glanced nervously at Huxley. He waved his hand dismissively.
“Just an act.”
Alessandra’s head began to whip left, then right, like she was trying to avoid someone from getting too close to her face.
From kissing her.
“Don’t! Please! Please, Father! I beg you!”
It was the voice of a thirteen-year-old girl about to be raped.
I jumped up.
“Take the ropes off her.” I shouted.
“Tommaso!” Lombardi grabbed my sleeve. “Sit down!”
“Take the ropes off! NOW!”
I pulled away and started for Alessandra.
A scream rose from her throat.
“NO! OH GOD, NO!”
Alessandra’s back arched, her head jerking backwards with each thrust, ah, ah, ah, ah…
“Stop it!” Huxley yelled. “Stop this acting!”
He reached out and slapped her.
Alessandra’s head flew back, then fell forward and hung there, her wrists still tied to the chair. Then her eyes slowly opened, and turned towards Huxley.
Chapter 82
“WHO DARES STRIKE MY BELOVED?”
It was the last time in my life I heard the hiss of that monster. A creature of her mind, like Lombardi believed? If only it were!
Alessandra raised her right arm, and the rope binding her to the chair snapped like sewing thread. Then her left arm jerked upwards, ripping off the chair arm, which hung there, swinging from her wrist like a scythe.
The stenographer let out a scream, and Hardwicke and Archer scrambled to their feet.
The sickly, green eyes slowly swept the room, until they came to rest on Huxley. Then they flared, like an ember struck with a poker.
“UNBELIEVER! THE TIME OF RECKONING HAS COME!”
“It’s…it’s all an act…nothing to be afraid of.” Huxley stood up and bared his teeth at Alessandra. “You don’t scare me!”
An invisible hand yanked him off his feet and flung him across the room, his arms flailing wildly, slamming him against the wall. Huxley slid to the floor and lay there stunned, blood streaming from his nose.
Hardwicke and Archer bolted for the door. Huxley rolled over and started crawling on his hands and knees after them. Archer frantically searched his pocket for the key, and jammed it in the lock.
“Open! Open! Damn you!”
Out in the hall, I could hear Farthing shouting.
“What the devil is going on in there?”
The door wouldn’t open.
Archer and Hardwicke scrambled across the room and crouched behind a chair. Huxley screamed, and we watched in horror as he was dragged backwards by his foot, kicking at some invisible hand, then pinwheeled across the floor and slammed against the wall a second time.
“AND THE LORD REACHED OUT HIS HAND…”
Alessandra lifted her hand and the séance table rose to the ceiling, hung there, then came crashing down – legs snapping, splinters of wood flying across the room. Alessandra bent down, picked up a leg from the shattered table and started across the room.
I remember shadows and shouting, the clanging of the electric bell, the screaming of the stenographer, Farthing pounding on the door, and Alessandra, lit by the lamp flame, heading for Huxley.
He was slumped against the wall, a gash across his forehead, one eye closed. When she reached him, he raised his fists and pawed the air with a few feeble punches.
Alessandra lifted her club high in the air.
“…AND GOD SMOTE HIM FOR HIS ERROR AND THERE HE DIED.”
I put my hands over my eyes.
“Alessandra, NO!”
Lombardi’s scream echoed in my ear.
Alessandra hesitated, then turned her head towards us, and in the lamp light I finally saw Savonarola himself – the sickly, putrid flesh, bloated and swollen, like a corpse pulled from a river, a writhing pot of maggot and worm, and those watery, slime-green eyes burning with hatred for our wretched world of sinners, doubters, disbelievers.
The ghoul turned back to Huxley and raised his club over his head. It started down, then suddenly stopped in mid-air – mercifully held back by what, I don’t know – and Alessandra collapsed to the floor like a discarded rag.
Lombardi reached her first.
Her eyes were open but they saw nothing. Blood flowed from her mouth and ears, her breathing ragged, her pulse feeble.
“We need to get her to a hospital!”
We heard a crash, the door flew open, and Farthing burst into the room. He flipped on the electric light and stared, mouth agape, at the battered Huxley, then at the demolished table.
“What the bloody hell!”
Chapter 83
“Out of the way! Out of the way!”
We fought our way down the stairs, past gawking maids and startled guests, Lombardi and Renard carrying Alessandra between them. A reporter came charging up the stairs and I shoved him aside.
“One more floor!” I shouted. We were almost there.
“My medical bag –Negri has it!” Lombardi yelled. “Get it!”
We hit the lobby and newspaper reporters rushed us, shouting questions, flash guns going off, people yelling and screaming.
“Let her breathe!” Lombardi shouted. “Please, give her room!”
I spun around, trying to spot Negri. Where the hell was he! My eyes swept the room, and I saw Damiano and Parenti, and Fournier lifting Zoe onto the bell desk to keep her from being trampled, and then Negri, standing on the piano bench, gaping at Alessandra. He didn’t see me. I started for him.
Then I heard Doffo scream.
“Pigotti!”
Doffo was frantically waving his hands.
“Pigotti!”
I looked in the direction he was pointing.
Pigotti was shoving his way through the milling crowd towards Alessandra, a pistol in his hand. “He’s got a gun!” someone shouted. People started screaming, backing away, falling over chairs to escape.
There was nothing I could do. I was too far away.
I watched the crowd part, Pigotti shove Renard out of the way, then raise the gun and aim it at Alessandra. Lombardi looked up, saw the gun, and stepped forward, shielding Alessandra.
The roar of the gunshot echoed off the wall.
Lombardi staggered backwards, and a bright red patch of blood slowly spread across his starched white shirt. Someone tackled Pigotti, knocking the gun from his hand, and he went down kicking and screaming, swallowed up by the angry crowd.
Chapter 84
Alessandra never got to see Lombardi buried.
She was in the hospital for five days, and the Jews bury their dead quickly. Renard found a synagogue on Via Cappella Vecchia and the rabbi handled everything. Dr. Lombardi’s wife and family had disowned him, so nobody from Torino came down for the service. Renard and I attended, and afterward we went over to his rented apartment with the rabbi to collect Lombardi’s things. Inside his closet, I found his personal diary, covering the year 1899 and his investigation of Alessandra.
The last entry, written the morning of December 21, was a poem to her.
Rise up my love and come away with me
The flowers appear on the earth and the time of singing has come.
I slipped the diary into my pocket for Alessandra.
It would mean a lot to her.
Alessandra was released from the hospital the day after Christmas, and we took her back to Piazza Dante. By then she knew that Lombardi was dead. I stayed with her until New Year’s Day, then accompanied Renard to the train station. Huxley had already left for England. The newspapers were focused on the shocking murder of Lombardi, and Huxley and his team had slipped out of Naples without talking to the press about what had happened upstairs that night. As he boarded his carriage for Paris, Renard handed me an envelope –money to pay the rent on Alessandra’s apartment for another month. He shook my hand.
“Write me, and let me know how she is doing.”
On the eve of the Feast of the Epiphany, I gave Alessandra Lombardi’s diary, the page folded back to his last words to her. We were sitting at the table talking about him, when we heard a knock on the door. It was Venzano.
He hurried over and handed a telegram to Alessandra.
“La Befana left this in my stocking.” He smiled. “But I believe it’s for you.”
Back in London, Henry Tyndall had issued an official statement to the London Times regarding the Society’s investigation in Naples. Huxley hadn’t signed it, but the other three had.
“With great intellectual reluctance, though without much personal doubt as to its justice, we the undersigned are of the opinion that we have witnessed in the presence of Alessandra Poverelli the action of some kinetic force, the nature and origin of which we cannot attempt to specify, through which, without the introduction of accomplices, apparatus, or mere manual dexterity, she is able to produce the movement of objects at a distance from her and unconnected to her in any apparent physical manner.”
Huxley resigned his position with the Society a week after returning to London. He never paid Alessandra her hundred pounds sterling.
Two months later, Hardwicke delivered the team’s final report to the Society’s Board of Directors. Renard sent me a copy. What was the source of that mysterious force which smashed a wooden table to smithereens, and tossed a six-foot, 200-pound man across the room like a rag doll? With fraud and trickery eliminated, Hardwicke noted, there remained but two possibilities – an unknown power of the human mind, like Lombardi believed, or an “intelligence external to the medium.”
He couldn’t bring himself to say spirits of the dead.
As I stood in the rain yesterday and watched Alessandra’s coffin being lowered into the grave, it occurred to me that Alessandra already had the answer.
Eventually, we’ll all know.
Chapter 85
Antonio is a fast writer.
It’s three P.M. now, and he already has the first two articles for the Sunday edition written and sent to layout. I’ll go down to the darkroom later tonight to choose the lead photo from Giorgio’s assembled pile.
After Lombardi’s murder, Alessandra left Naples and moved to Rome. She never married, but found her sunny apartment and got a cat, just like she had always dreamed of. Her vindication in Naples allowed her to support herself by giving private séances. Ironically, her apartment was just around the corner from the Vatican, but the Church stopped pursuing her once she disappeared from the news. Pigotti? He’s rotting away in a prison in Naples. Ten years earlier, he would have gone to the gallows, but Italy abolished capital punishment in 1889.
I quickly worked my way up the Mattino ladder with Venzano’s support, and a decade later moved to Rome to work for the Messaggero as sub-editor then managing editor, then the big seat. Alessandra and I saw each other often, and she always came to my house for Christmas. Doffo’s here too. I brought him up to Rome as soon as I became editor, and he’s busy skewering everybody. I’ve given him free rein to go after what Garibaldi famously branded "that pestilential institution called the Papacy." He and Pietro have a place now. Pietro still works for Cardinal Uccello, and keeps Doffo supplied with secrets and scandals.
Alessandra stayed in her apartment until her consumption finally forced her into the hospital. I used my pull to get her into a private sanitarium in Trastevere, across the Tiber, but close enough to the Messaggero office that I could visit her every day.
On Monday, I’ll take the train to Paris to meet Monsieur Pathé and pitch him on my idea of making a film about Alessandra’s life.
I told Alessandra about it the night she lay dying. She had lost a lot of weight, and the long sleeves of her dress now hid ulcers instead of Pigotti’s cigarette burns. But the ruins of her beauty were still visible, in her long black hair, untouched by grey, and in her eyes.
“Who will play me?” she whispered.
“How about Pina Menichelli?” I said, reaching out to take her hand.
She smiled. “Wouldn’t that be wonderful.” I knew she would like that. She had seen Pina in Il Fuoco, and the vamp had become her favorite actress.
“But first we have to convince Monsieur Pathé,” I said. “Wish me luck.”
Alessandra began to cough violently, and Maria appeared at the door with fresh handkerchiefs. Alessandra waved her away, and fell back into her chair, exhausted.
“My bureau…” she said, pointing to her bedroom. “… small blue box…”
I went in, found the box and brought it to her.
“Open it, Tommaso” she said.
Inside was a silk purse, and inside that was a tiny cat figurine carved in alabaster. Alessandra looked at me and smiled.
“Take Bastet with you.�
�
Just before midnight, she took a turn for the worse, and the doctor pulled me into the hall and warned me the end had come. She died early the next morning, her hand in mine, as the sun flooded through her window and the light in those luminous eyes of hers faded away.
Bastet’s here in my pocket.
I’ll let you know what happens.
END
Author’s Note
The Witch of Napoli is a work of fiction. Its inspiration was the true-life story of controversial Italian medium Eusapia Palladino (1854-1918). Parapsychologists cite Palladino’s table levitations as some of the most baffling and impressive feats of psychokinesis ever observed and recorded. In the many historical books, newspaper stories and scientific reports dealing with her life, you’ll find many memorable quotes, descriptions and observations expressed in the unique language of the 19th century. I managed to slip a few of them into my novel. They include:
“Her large eyes, filled with strange fire, sparkled in their orbits, or again seem filled with swift gleams of phosphorescent fire, sometimes bluish, sometimes golden. If I did not fear that the metaphor were too easy when it concerns a Neapolitan woman, I should say that her eyes appear like the glowing lava fires of Vesuvius, seen from a distance in a dark night.” – Monsieur Arthur Levy penned this evocative description of Palladino after attending a séance with her in 1898 at the house of celebrated French astronomer Camille Flammarion. The astronomer later included Levy’s description in a book he published in 1907 entitled “Mysterious Psychic Forces: An Account of the Author’s Investigations in Psychical Research, Together with Those of Other European Savants.”
“As a child, she saw eyes glaring at her in the darkness, and was frightened one night when invisible hands stripped off her bedclothes.” – Eusapia Palladino’s mentor and champion Dr. Cesare Lombroso shares this gossip about Palladino in his 1909 book entitled After Death—What? Spiritistic Phenomena and Their Interpretation.
The Witch of Napoli Page 24
