The First Prehistoric Serial Killer and Other Stories

by Teresa Solana

  9 February

  Elisenda is all of a flutter at the possibility that we will soon have guests who watch television. As she was born in the eighteenth century and never saw it in her lifetime, she became an addict the moment she discovered the box, and doesn’t miss a minute. The problem is that we ghosts can’t watch TV if someone doesn’t switch it on first; in other words, we’ve been disconnected from the world for eight years. What’s the latest fashion, I wonder? How are Barça doing? As we have no up-to-date news, we kill time laying bets.

  Elisenda and Anastase have spent the most time in the house; they died violently at the end of the eighteenth century. Elisenda is the granddaughter of Sebastià Molina and the only one who survived a plague epidemic that decimated the family. Elisenda was married to Bernat, an irritable, ruddy-cheeked, bushy-browed man of wealth, and Bernat sent Elisenda to the other side with Anastase when he discovered that his wife and lifelong friend were lovers. He found them in bed together one day, grabbed his hunting rifle and shot them on the spot. When she passed on, Elisenda was thirty-six and had given Bernat two children, and bachelor Anastase was forty-one.

  Anastase, who is evil-minded, says that Bernat lost it when he saw his was bigger, but we all know how Anastase likes to brag. Elisenda was very lucky, because the bullet hit her heart and did very little visible damage, whereas Anastase was shot in the face and balls, which didn’t leave him looking very pretty. Although you get used to him, it’s quite a shock when you bump into him unexpectedly in a passageway. To avoid upsets, we insist he wears a cowbell.

  Antoni is one of Elisenda’s children, and he’s with us too. This Antoni is Josep’s father, and they’ve both been acting the ghost in Villa Diana for nigh on two hundred years. Josep was knifed to death by his twin brother Jaume, in a family row over which of them was the heir; their birth certificate had disappeared and nobody in the family remembered whether Josep or Jaume had been born first. The inheritance was very desirable, and in a wild outburst Jaume, who’d inherited his grandfather’s moods, decided to do something about it. The knifing didn’t amount to more than a few scratches, but Josep was unlucky and they became infected. As antibiotics had yet to be invented, all the doctor could do was sign his death certificate.

  Antoni, Josep’s father, died of a heart attack the moment he saw his favourite son receive that fratricidal stab. As he’d hitherto been very healthy and death left him unmarked, he’s the ghost who is in best shape. Jaume was never imprisoned because the family kept it quiet, and he finally inherited the house and the factories his father had built in Manresa and Barcelona. He immediately married a bankrupt but toffee-nosed aristocrat who bore him a daughter, Carmeta. Like her mother, Carmeta only had one child, another Jaume, and this Jaume begat Margarida, who is consequently one of Antoni’s great-granddaughters and one of the youngest ghosts prowling around the mansion.

  Margarida made her entry at the sweet young age of twenty-three, at the end of the nineteenth century, as a result of amorous deceptions. My relative decided to commit suicide with arsenic, convinced someone would save her at the last minute and that her ex-fiancé would have a rethink, but she overdosed and died. She now accepts that her father was right when he said that her head was full of stuff and nonsense because she was reading too many novels. And, obviously, given that she’s rather dim-witted, the idea of going to a chemist’s and swallowing a few spoonfuls of poison wasn’t her own. From then on, we banned Flaubert.

  The proof that great-great-grandmother Mercedes (may she rest in peace) was right when she complained that the maids were a lazy lot and only cleaned lightly is poor Arnau, who was poisoned by his wife Violeta with the spare arsenic that had simply been left over and forgotten in the pantry. As Violeta was brighter than Margarida and poisoned her husband slowly and patiently, his death certificate states that the cause of death was chronic gastroenteritis, source unknown. Obviously, the doctor was no genius. The proof is that nobody ever suspected her.

  The father of Violeta’s second husband keeps Arnau company: Antoni-intestines, who came to live here when he was widowed. We call him Antoni-intestines to distinguish him from Antoni-heart-attack, Josep’s father. As Antoni-intestines died when he was blown up by a bomb an anarchist threw into the stalls at the Liceu opera house, he now travels this world as best he can with his guts hanging out.

  Lluís is the son of Violeta and her second husband, and is also a ghost. He and Paquita, who’d been in service with the family from the age of fourteen and was responsible for initiating the Molinas into the world of sex, had the bad luck to be at home when a bomb dropped by German pilots in the spring of 1937 hit its target and blew up the ceiling of the master bedroom. We never have got to the bottom of what they were both doing in bed at siesta time while Lluís’s wife was visiting her sister in Gràcia. When the bomb dropped, Lluís was sixty-six and Paquita forty-two.

  Eugenia is perhaps, of us all, the one who’s to be pitied most. She also wears a cowbell. She was knocked down by a train in 1976 in Canet de Mar after she’d just left a protest concert. It’s not easy to describe the state she was left in because the train that ran over her made a right mess. Her version is that it was very hot and she was on her way to the beach in the moonlight when she stumbled on the line in her rope sandals and gave the train driver no time to brake. Though she denies it, some people reckon she’d been smoking dope during the concert and was a bit fuzzy-headed. Be that as it may, she too is with us here purging her sins.

  Despite the fact that Eugenia’s accident was highly dramatic and made mincemeat of her, her head is in perfect shape because she was decapitated by the train and her head rolled intact down to the beach. Ever since, she has carried it under the only arm she has left. Eugenia is one of Lluís’s great-granddaughters (the guy who was bombed), and, like many of us here, is one of the black sheep of the family. When she was buried, everybody agreed that my cousin would never have come good given the lifestyle she was leading.

  Santi is the last member of the family who lived in this house, and has yet to come to terms with his status as a soul in purgatory. He was no chicken when he hurled himself and his Alfa Romeo over a precipice at two hundred and fifty an hour en route to the casino in Monte Carlo; his most outstanding virtues were his innate capacity to drink Cardhu without getting drunk and his total ignorance of what work was all about.

  As for yours truly, I am Eugenia’s cousin and have been a ghost since 1981. In my case, I died aged thirty-five in a rather silly fashion: from an overdose of adulterated heroin. I too never actually worked, but rather than polishing off the family inheritance in casinos on the Côte d’Azur like my nephew Santi, I was into the theatre, poetry and drugs. Frankly, I was a dead loss as an actor, a piss-poor poet and, as a druggy, ended my life as a piece of shit in a trendy club to the sound of a song by the Bee Gees, who, by the way, never wowed me. In such straits, I’d rather have passed away listening to Lou Reed or Janis Joplin and not that sentimental claptrap, but as Eugenia, who has always had a rather mystical side to her, says, in this life you get what you deserve.

  19 February

  Jacqueline came back this morning accompanied by the estate agent and a very strange individual. Santi says he must be an interior designer. The man scrutinized every corner of the house and said it would be a lot of work but he’d do a good job. I imagine this means that they’re going to buy the mansion and are planning to refurbish. As this kind of transaction takes time, we’ll just have to be patient. In the meantime, we keep laying bets as to who’s in government and who won the league.

  7 March

  After almost three weeks without any news, Jacqueline came back today with that oddball, whose name is Rafa. We discovered that the couple have finally bought the house and that Rafa isn’t just an interior designer, as Santi suggested, but a guru who preaches a way-out religion. Jacqueline gave him a cheque and he promised to chase bad vibrations and evil spirits away from the house.

  After drinkin
g a cup of tea, Rafa took his shoes off and put on a white tunic that was rather tight on him. He immediately began lighting candles and distributing them throughout the house while he burned joss sticks and recited exorcisms in a language none of us could identify. We had to hide quickly in the small cupboard where they stored brooms and a bucket, because, although candles and exorcisms have no impact on us, the fumes are torture. Luckily, according to Elisenda, this kind of magic is very spectacular but short-lived.

  From the very start, I’d thought the guy peculiar, but Santi reckons that’s what interior designers are like.

  10 March

  We’ve been shut up in the cupboard for three days and still can’t come out. We’re very uncomfortable in here, accustomed as we are to having four hundred square metres to ourselves. Elisenda says that at most Rafa’s spell might last for a week, and that we shouldn’t despair.

  All of us who still have fingers crossed them in the hope that our forebear is right.

  14 March

  We were finally able to leave the little cupboard this afternoon. The effects of the exorcism have faded and the house is now full of painters and builders. They’re doing a full-scale refurbishment and have created a real pigsty. It doesn’t seem the same house.

  We gathered from Jacqueline’s conversations with Rafa that Andreu is a financial tycoon and also rather tight-fisted. Jacqueline is his second wife, and Andreu’s children can’t stand her. We also found out that she was a fashion model who, years ago, trod the catwalks. That explains why she’s so shapely.

  It’s fun to have mortals back and we’re so happy. We’re hoping that they’ll employ an attractive young maid because the rich are mostly not at home and we ghosts must often make do with spying on the servants and pestering them.

  2 May

  They’ve finally finished the building work and brought the new furniture. Rafa, the man in the white tunic, returned and Elisenda, Paquita and Margarida rushed back into the little cupboard. This time, however, we were all safe and sound because he didn’t fumigate. The fellow did lots of play-acting (I have to confess he’s a better actor than I am), and simply explained how the furniture should be arranged according to the philosophy of feng shui. Jacqueline, who is rather simple-minded, was all excited.

  The bad news is that we have discovered that there are now only two mirrors in the house. They have put one in Andreu’s bathroom and the other in Jacqueline’s. The mirror in Jacqueline’s bathroom is full-length but is inside her cosmetics cupboard, so when the door is closed there might as well be no mirror. Santi says it’s because they’ve found out that mirrors drain people’s energy, although they don’t yet know how because mirrors are made from sand and, in principle, have neither brains nor wills of their own. It’s clearly a feng shui thing and not worth getting a headache over.

  The mirror business is a bastard, however, because, as everybody knows, we ghosts use mirrors to change dimension, and they are indispensable. During the day, we’re compelled to stay on the other side of the mirror and can’t make contact with mortals, however much their exorcisms may impact on us in that phantom dimension where left and right are interchanged. We ghosts cannot enter the world of the living until midnight, and, to complicate matters, we can only do so through a mirror.

  Until now, we each had our favourite. Eugenia and Elisenda always used the spectacular mirror in the entrance hall that had a hand-carved, gold-leaf frame, while Josep, Antoni and Paquita usually used the one in the dining room. Margarida preferred the small mirror in one of the guest bedrooms, the one decorated with maritime motifs, and Anastase and Antoni-intestines always came out of the ones in the main bedroom. Lluís and Santi had a preference for the mirror in the maid’s bedroom, especially when the maid slept naked there in summer. Yours truly had always liked the small mirror in one corner of the library, by the chaise longue, that also had a gold-leaf frame. Following the refurbishment there’s no library, no books and no mirror, and, from now on, when we want to change dimensions, we’ll have to use the mirror in Andreu’s bathroom. It will be rather unseemly if now and then we coincide with his midnight poos.

  15 May

  They are quite a grey couple and neither spends much time in the house. When he’s not playing golf, Andreu is at the office in meetings, while Jacqueline goes to the gym, shops or is at her girlfriends’. If it weren’t for the maid and the gardener, who shack up of an afternoon and offer us a few homespun porn sessions, it would be as tedious as ever here. Luckily, the couple watch TV in the evening.

  25 May

  It was a foregone conclusion that it would happen sooner or later. At midnight, when we were about to come out of Andreu’s bathroom mirror, we caught him vomiting in the toilet bowl. As he was drunk and didn’t get there in time, he left a fine mess. Tomorrow, Nati, the maid, will curse him to high heaven.

  After Andreu came out of the bathroom, he and Jacqueline rowed because she didn’t feel like doing it. She shut herself in their bedroom and he went down to the lounge in a rage. He almost fell and rolled down the staircase, but in the end collapsed on the sofa, switched on the telly and immediately fell asleep. We watched a porn film. To be honest, it was awful.

  27 May

  We’re back in the little cupboard. Jacqueline says the house gives her bad vibrations and she’s called Rafa again, who has burned more joss sticks, lit more candles and recited more exorcisms. I’d told Josep to watch it, that interfering in the dreams of the living creates problems, but he’s as stubborn as a mule. He’s been snooping in Jacqueline’s dreams night after night and we’re all paying for it now.

  4 June

  We’ve just come out of the cupboard and Rafa is back. On this occasion, however, he’s not here to purify anything but to have a fling with the lady of the house, and they’re both jiggling away in the bedroom right now. We’ve finally got a bit of action …!

  Andreu is on a business trip, as Jacqueline told Rafa, who stayed overnight. In Jacqueline’s favour, I should add that Andreu took his secretary with him, as well as some new underpants and a box of condoms. Personally, if I had to choose between Andreu and Rafa, I’d go for Andreu anytime. We all find Rafa and the gold chains he wears round his neck far too vulgar.

  5 June

  Elisenda smells a rat. She thinks Rafa is up to no good. As soon as she can she’ll try to penetrate his dreams and see if she can find out what he’s up to. But she will have to wait until midnight, because we can’t do anything from this side of the mirror.

  6 June

  Elisenda is right: this guy is fishy. She didn’t even have to enter his dreams to find out that he was plotting something. His own behaviour betrayed him.

  As soon as Jacqueline fell asleep, Rafa got up silently and prowled round the house. He was looking for the safe, and when he found it hidden behind a painting, he grinned broadly. Old Andreu is so original. And interior designers too …!

  The rascal also found the drawer where Jacqueline keeps her jewels, but he simply examined them one by one and put them back where they belonged. Then he rummaged in her handbag and took an imprint of the house keys. When they left the house mid-morning and Jacqueline switched on the alarm, he registered the combination and discreetly jotted it down on a piece of paper. Jacqueline is so stupid she didn’t even notice. But one hardly needs to be Sherlock Holmes to know what Rafa is after.

  11 June

  Andreu is on another business trip and Rafa is back. We were all keen to go through the bathroom mirror at midnight and Elisenda entered his dreams. She emerged in a state of shock.

  Rafa belongs to a gang of professional criminals who specialize in using esoteric nonsense to pull the wool over the eyes of the rich. They’ve not yet decided on a date, but now that they know the code for the alarm and where the safe and jewels are, they’re intending to break in one night and force Andreu to give them the combination, because Jacqueline doesn’t know what it is. They’ll then shoot the two of them in cold blood so as not to
leave any eyewitnesses.

  12 June

  Emergency meeting: we must act. If this guy and his gang do in Andreu and Jacqueline, they’ll both turn into ghosts and stay on to live with us from now to eternity. We can’t allow that, because Jacqueline and Andreu aren’t family and, besides, they’re deadly boring.

  We organized a brainstorming session and everyone chipped in. Bernat suggested we terrorize Andreu and Jacqueline into abandoning the house, but that would risk Jacqueline summoning Rafa back with his joss sticks and we’d have to spend another week in the little cupboard.

  The other proposals aren’t even worth mentioning.

  We are still pondering.

  13 June

  Still haven’t come up with anything.

  14 June

  We’re beginning to get nervous.

  17 June

  Antoni-intestines finally came up with a solution: we should scare the thieves, not the couple. When they open the door and walk into the house (let’s hope they do so after midnight), we shall give them a little surprise that we hope won’t be fatal, because I don’t think any of us could stand being forced to share eternity with Rafa and his gold chains. Eugenia will be the first they’ll see, mincemeat and head under arm, and then Anastase with his shattered face and nether regions. If they still haven’t run off in fright, Antoni-intestines will come onstage. And if Antoni doesn’t do the trick, the rest of us will enter wailing.

  It’s a fantastic strategy and we all congratulated Antoni. Let’s hope we don’t lose our nerve!