Chapter 4 The Great Unveiling

Luigi, totally unaware of my plan to bring him down, was already out filling his pockets with the most aerodynamic stones he could find, planning of course to throw them at poor Alberto, when Redpaw, having taken the outer form of a beautiful young girl, made his appearance.

‘I will scare the wits out of him,’ he thought, but his optimism was soon to be proved rather misplaced.

‘Come!’ said the little devil with the sweetest most innocent voice he could master. ‘I’ll show you where the ravens lay their eggs.’

‘How do you know that?’ said the boy with obvious disbelief.

‘I live here,’ replied the girl.

‘I bet you are the daughter of some servant woman,’ said the boy indifferently.

‘Something like that,’ replied Redpaw, ‘they call me Adeline.’

‘Ha, I knew it,’ said with comical arrogance the little pig faced boy. ‘Then I am your master, since your mother is my father’s servant. You’d better watch your tongue around me, girl, or both you and your mother will be sacked!’

‘Whatever you say, Sir,’ replied the “girl” with fake modesty. ‘Then I suppose you won’t want me to show you those nests I was telling you about.’

‘I order you to take me there at once!’ said the rude boy. ‘And be quick about it!’

So Redpaw and the dim-witted Luigi, after having passed through a big opening in the garden fence that had collapsed many years before, started walking in an unknown to the boy marshland filled with all kinds of filth and refuse.

‘Yuck, this place stinks!’ said Luigi with disgust. ‘Are you sure this is the right way?’

‘Oh, absolutely, Sir,’ replied“Adeline” with a devious smile, ‘you can trust me.’

As they were moving forward, the ground under their feet was getting more and more muddy. That, naturally, caused the fat boy with the stones in his pockets to get bogged down deeper and deeper in the mud till he got completely stuck. He was unable to move back and forth anymore. Adeline-Redpaw on the other hand seemed to move on without any trouble at all.

‘Where do you think you are going?’ yelled angrily the nasty boy, ‘I command you to help me get out of here!’

Redpaw stopped and turned to face the boy.

‘Now he’ll wet his pants,’ he said to himself with a mischievous chuckle.

When it came to playing such nasty tricks on people, there was no one like Redpaw. He took his most miserable, frightened tone and, looking around nervously, he said with a slightly trembling voice:

‘You…you have to leave this place, sir. It’s not safe!’

‘What are you mumbling about, girl?’ laughed the disgusting boy. ‘And why exactly should I leave? Explain yourself!’

‘There’s evil in this house,’ muttered the little girl ‘deep evil.’

‘There’s evil, there’s evil,’ mocked Luigi imitating Adeline’s frightened tone. ‘You don’t know the half of it. If you don’t get me out of here right away, all hell will break loose!’

Redpaw deepened his voice to make it sound manly and actually very dark. Naturally such a voice coming from a human being, especially when that human being is a blonde little girl, would scare witless any sensible boy of Luigi’s age.

‘THE EVIL IS HERE!’ said the demon with an evil smile, certain that he had succeeded in scaring Luigi.

‘Coool!’ said the boy obviously impressed. ‘How do you make your voice so deep? It sounded almost like a burp. I can do it too, you know? I can burp the alphabet. Want to hear?’

And with that, without any trace of fear, he started burping the alphabet blowing away any atmosphere of horror.

‘Damn me! To hell! That boy is something else,’ thought Redpaw. ‘The evil is within me,’ he said and at the same moment his eyes started glowing with an otherworldly green light.

Anyone who possessed a brain larger than that of a fly would have soiled his pants, but not Luigi!

‘Awesome!’ he laughed ‘I see you also are in the habit of swallowing things. I used to do it too, when I was little. I used to swallow my legos but the doctors always managed to get them out of my stomach. Tell me when did you swallow the flashlight. Surely it is still in your stomach and the light comes out from your eyes.’

‘I didn’t swallow a flashlight,’ growled the demon.

‘Then what is this?’ asked clearly bewildered the dim-witted oaf. ‘Is there a hidden power plant on these grounds that the government is trying to keep secret? Cool! You might even grow a tail.’

Poor Redpaw now felt like evil was truly there and was about to burst in tears. With that I mean the evil manifested in the form of the immensely stupid Luigi.

‘You idiot,’ he yelled full of rage. ‘Don’t you get it? I’m a horrible monster. The house you’ve come to live in is evil. You are all in great danger!’

And, as the stupid boy didn’t seem to get it yet, he let out a bloodcurdling terrifying howl like a wolf, hoping to convince him.

‘Well,’ said Luigi, ’with all the tricks that you can do you could surely find a job at the circus or at least at the opera. Mom forces me to go there willy-nilly and I’ve seen a lot of the ladies on stage howl exactly like that.

Beside himself with rage, Redpaw with his moral broken beyond repair turned his back to the boy ready to leave.

‘Where do you think you are going?’ said Luigi. ‘Help me get out of here or else I will…I will…’

‘I hope you stay there until you rot,’ said Redpaw with tears in his eyes but since he didn’t want any real harm to befall Luigi he added: ‘If you drop the stones you carry in your pockets, your empty head, full of air as it is, will probably help you get out.’

‘And what about the eggs? Won’t you lead me to the eggs?’ asked the nasty boy obviously very disappointed.

‘Oh no,’ said Readpaw and, immensely annoyed, he turned his back to Luigi and returned to me like a dog with his tail between his legs.

In the match between me, the House, and the rich hicks the result was unfortunately a tie. A great success for me with the neurotic Signora Bartolini, an utter failure with her stupid son. Everything now would be judged in the showdown between me and old Giacomo and I was determined not to give in easily.

Luigi’s father was sitting with his wife in my great living room enjoying his drink. Mrs. Bartolini was feeling better and was sitting on a chair by her husband mumbling, while he was assuring her that what she thought she had seen was nothing more than a hallucination caused by the high level of oxygen in the area. It was for that reason that Mr. Bartolini had accepted most readily Bony’s suggestion to have the windows opened so that Madam might get used to the fresh air. That of course was no accident. Not so long after that a strange figure entered the living room uninvited to upset the apparent peacefulness.

She was Gorge disguised as an old gypsy woman with a lot of charms and strange trinkets around her neck. Gorge was a spook that usually inhabitedthe cellar. Her dislike for humans was deeply rooted in the olden days when she worked as a dryad and some conscienceless men chopped down her thousand year old tree that coincidentally had its roots exactly at the spot where at a later time I was built. When she lost her job, she was forced to stay a homeless traveling elf for many years, haunting the place where her beloved tree once stood, until she sought refuge in me. I don’t have to point out that since then she had been regarding all humans as a real threat and of course she wouldn’t give me a moment’s peace, until I allowed her to play a small part in the chasing away of the Bartolini intruders.

Once she was in, she immediately started playing her part.

‘Oh, what dark auras!’ she muttered with a trembling, weak voice.

‘Go away, gypsy woman, this is not a place for you,’ said Bony in a particularly cold tone of voice. ‘Can’t you see you are upsetting the gentle people of this house?’

‘Do not send me away, good Sir!’ she cried stretching her hands in a beseeching way towards Signor Giacomo. ‘I’ve come to warn you.’

At the sound of that he felt as if an electric charge had shot through his body. He was one of those persons who like to brag about their practical, non superstitious mind, but in reality he was afraid of the supernatural more than he would care to admit.

‘Leave her!’ he said with a forced smile. ‘Let’s hear what she has to say!’

‘Oh, my good Sir, what a good heart you have!’ meowed the gypsy woman. ‘You have to watch out more than the rest or the darkness will envelop you. It’s all around you.’

‘Darkness,’ he repeated with a defiant sneer.

‘Darkness. Dark darkness. Darker than the blackest pit,’ said with a toothless smile the crone.

‘Ridiculous’, he said trying to hide his uneasiness.

‘I feel waves of disbelief moving in my direction,’ said sweetly the gypsy woman. ‘You may choose not to believe it, kind Sir, but everyone around you is wearing a mask, masks that soon will drop. You made a great mistake coming here.’

‘You were right,’ said Mr. Giacomo turning to Bony, ‘I’ve heard enough. Show this wrinkled old hag out and fill my glass. I need a double scotch after all this rubbish.’

Immediately a servant obediently rushed to fill his glass.

‘Come on, woman,’ said Bony in a stern voice ‘this place is not for you.’

And with that he pulled away Gorge, with so much strength that one of her eyes flew out of its socket and after travelling in the air for a while fell into Mr. Giacomo’s glass with a huge splash.

Mr. Bartolini at the mere sight of it screeched at so high a tone that everyone would have laughed, had they been free to do so. His reaction was really funny, if not hilarious. He just kept sitting there horrified looking at the round eyeball full of red veins staring at him with nerve from the bottom of the glass.

‘It “looks” like you wanted your scotch “on the rocks” Sir,’ said Gorge with a wicked laughter and with those words still echoing in the air she turned around and disappeared all the while laughing hysterically: ‘The darkness is watching you, he he!’

‘Her eye,’ mumbled Mr. Bartolini filled with horror, ‘her eye popped out and, and…’

‘Yes,’ said Bony indifferently, ‘it must be made out of glass. They make them so realistic these days that you can’t tell them from the real ones. By the way, Sir, dinner is ready. Shall I show you to the table?’

‘No, Giacomo,’ said trembling Signora Bartolini, ‘now you’ve seen it too! Something is horribly wrong here! Let’s get out of this place, while we still have the time.’

‘Nonsense’, he growled, ‘it will take something more than a glass eye, no matter how well made, to scare Giacomo Bartolini away. I’m sure that we’ll see things differently on a full stomach.’

‘Oh, without the shadow of a doubt, Sir,’ agreed Bony. ‘Please, follow me to the dining room and dinner will be served in no time. Someone will go call the young master. Permit me to say with all due respect that nothing binds a family together like the dinner table.’

‘Absolutely,’ agreed Signor Giacomo, ‘someone should go and see what that little rascal is up to. He’s probably out there, hunting blackbirds.’

‘I wish I were,’, said a familiar voice and the “young master” entered the living room, covered in mud and in a foul mood, reminding more than ever before a filthy little pig.

‘Goodness gracious, what’s happened to you?’ yelled his father ‘By God, if you weren’t my son, no one would be able to save you from my hands.’

‘It’s not my fault,’ grumbled Luigi, ‘that mean girl, Adeline, is to blame. She had promised to show me the place where the ravens lay their eggs but she tricked me instead. You should send them away, both her and her mother. That will teach her to pull such stupid pranks on her betters. But there is one thing I’ll say for her: she talks with burps better than me and if she lied and she really did swallow a flashlight, she must have one hell of a stomach.’

’All right, all right, the two of us will have plenty of time to talk about it later. Now you’d better wash yourself and come to dinner.

‘Okay,’ said Luigi with a gluttonous expression on his face and immediately disappeared to do as his father had said.

In a little while the whole family was sitting at the dinner table and everything looked ideal. The white tablecloth, the candlesticks with the lit candles, knives and forks all in their right place by the plates.

The servants moved around hastily. The special platters covered with their mysterious covers started to align themselves on the table like soldiers ready for battle.

Nobody could suspect what would follow. The hicks were growing all the more impatient to find out what they would gobble up, since no smell was betraying what lay inside those mysterious platters.

‘So,’ said Bony with a strange look, ‘may I serve you, my noble Sir? The cook has put all his art in it and is anxious to know what you think of his cooking.’

‘Yes, yes, serve me already!’ said Signor Bartolini. ‘Don’t dawdle!’

‘Right away, Sir,’ said Bony obediently. ‘First plate: Escargots.’

And with that he lifted the cover of the first platter to reveal its content. Unbelievable! On a piece of almost brown grass one could see slimy snails going back and forth like disgusting little snacks from hell.

‘Aaah!’ screamed Mr. Giacomo filled with disgust.

‘Iiiih!’ cried Signora Lucia and fainted once more.

‘Gross,’ said Luigi, ‘that’s even worse than when mom tried to cook something herself.’

‘Are you completely insane?’ shouted the man. ‘Whose idea was this horrid prank?’

‘Yes horrid,’ agreed Luigi, ‘and we are hungry.’

’Oh, I am truly sorry, Sir. But if the first dish wasn’t to your liking, the next is guaranteed to elevate you into heavens of flavor: Spaghetti al pomodoro.

And with those words he lifted the cover of the second platter to reveal the second nauseating idea of Slimetooth, who, as I’ve mentioned earlier, played the part of the cook. This time the platter was filled with worms of the kind chickens love to gobble up. They were swimming in something that looked like thick blood but in fact was mud made of red soil.

‘Noooo!’ screamed Signor Giacomo and springing from his seat grabbed Bony by the collar of his shirt.

But the time for jokes was over and the great unveiling was imminent. Suddenly Bony’s skin and flesh being nothing more than an illusion melted away. In front of Signor Bartolini, frightened and socked beyond words, appeared the living skeleton of my basement, looking at him through the empty sockets of his grinning scull.

‘No, it’s not true, it’s a nightmare,’ he kept repeating to himself over and over again. ‘It’s a lie!’ he screamed.

‘It’s a lie!’ repeated the monsters, as one by one they started throwing away their transformation to reveal their true horrifying identity.

‘Noooo!’ screamed the rich hick beside himself and forgetting his wife and son started running with all speed his trembling legs could master to his ridiculous car.

‘No, Giacomo, don’t leave me!’ yelled his wife who had in the meantime regained her consciousness and witnessed this horrific scene. ‘Take me with you!’

‘Dad, I don’t like it here,’ screeched Luigi.

And with that the rich hicks ran into the garden and out the front gate to get inside their car and disappear forever.

It goes without saying that I wouldn’t let them go without playing one final charming trick on them. While my macabre little dinner was being served, I had ordered a few of my creeping vines to tie themselves as tentacles to the car’s bumper to prevent it from moving.

No matter how hard they tried, the hicks were unable to make their car break off and escape.

‘Start, start!’ barked Mr. Bartolini covered in sweat stepping frantically on the gas. But no matter how much he swore, no matter how much he cursed my creeping vines, thanks to my amazing haunted power, did not drew away and the car remained stuck in place.

My monsters were already out clawing at the window panes and Signora Bartolini had passed out for the hundredth time, when finally with a gigantic crack the bumper snapped off letting the car slide away and take with it the rich hicks.

It was a triumph, an absolute triumph! My monsters were cheering. Some were screaming, some were climbing on my walls, others were flying around. As for me, I was enjoying my great victory. Bartolini had gone forever taking with him his nose picking son, his cigarette butts and that stupid wife of his.

‘Mrs. Giacometti will not find other tenants like that for a while,’ I thought. But soon I was to be proved wrong.