Silverfinger, page 6
part #3 of Cherry Delight Series
“But when you do wake up, the Mafia will be gone.”
I crossed my fingers as I said this last—a little private superstition, if you will—and told myself that what I said had better come true, for all our sakes. By this time we were well within the shipyards and could see the knots of workers clustered together, talking excitedly.
One group pulled us in among them, where pretended enthusiasm over the coming strike, and the hope that we would all double our salaries. Ines tried to put on a good face, but it hurt her. She was thinking in terms of ownership and what all this trouble was going to cost her family. In a way, I didn’t blame her.
Then a man grabbed us both and drew us off to one side.
“Tonight we gather at the abbey ruins,” he muttered.
“Oh? What for?” I asked.
His glance was sharp, suspicious. “I thought you were one of us,” he muttered. “I wouldn’t have spoken to you if I hadn’t believed that, the way you were with the foreman, his letting you off work to go around with that man Silvestri… .”
My wits came back to me, “Of course I’m one of you. The abbey ruins! I was wool-gathering. I’m sorry. I’ll be there, with my friend.”
A look of relief touched the face of the workingman. “Bene, bene. It’s because of our worship that things have been so good for us, you know.”
I winked at him. “Don’t I know it.”
He put his heavy hand on my shoulder. “You be there, now. Of course I may not know you with a mask on—we all wear masks, as you know—but I’ll be able to pick you out.”
His eyes went to my breasts where they pushed into the blue cotton of my working woman’s blouse, showing their outlines quite clearly. I had a good bra on, but a bra can do only so much to hide a pair of tits like mine. I gave the man another wink and a wicked smile.
“I’ll be looking for you,” I told him. And I would be, too. Because I was already beginning to suspect the sort of gathering that would be taking place in the hills behind the town, come the full moon. These hills are part of the Aspromonte range, which was called Sila in very ancient times, and in those ancient times pagan fires had been lighted to show the stars the pagan altars on which living sacrifices had been offered to the pagan gods. Not that I expected these workers to make a human sacrifice, except perhaps symbolically: they were going to offer up homage to Satan.
Or so I suspected, at least.
I questioned Ines about it when we finally went back to work. The strike was a thing of the future, for now the workers were content to do their jobs and wait for Silverfinger to summon them to the picket lines. Ines could tell me nothing, though she was quite excited about the idea.
“I’ve heard a lot about this devil worship. Old Tessa is a fanatic about it, though oddly enough, she goes to Church every Sunday and says her rosary beads. I think it’s in the very blood of these people, Why, there are wise men and women to whom the people go for a reading of their future, even some of them who emigrate to America write back and send money to these maciaros. They are sorcerers, they are believed to derive their powers from Satan.”
“Baloney,” I said inelegantly.
Her eyes were very serious as she regarded me, shaking her head. “Not to these people, Cherry. It’s a way of life for them. They pay for love philtres that really work, they buy talismans and amulets blessed by these wizards and witches—all very hush-hush, naturally—and sometimes they even die because they believe that a spell has been cast on them.”
A first cousin to voodoo, I told myself. Well, voodoo works if you believe in it; it’s an instance of mind over matter. Convince yourself that you are cursed, and you are. When in Rome do as the Romans do is an old adage. In a manner of speaking I was in Rome: in Calabria where maciaro and maciara flourished. If I could, I would avail myself of these beliefs. It might help me offset the power of the Mafia.
We worked until the whistle shrilled. Then we picked up our lunch pails and joined the workers streaming out of the big gates toward their homes. The guards had been quadrupled around the shipping yards, I could see husky men with holstered guns at their belts coming to work as our ordinary workers went home. I got the feeling that any Mafia bombers who might come to destroy the Condottiero would be met with a hail of well-aimed bullets. I also felt that the Mafia knew this, too.
We walked through narrow, dirty streets between stuccoed buildings with windows shuttered to keep out the hot Calabrian sunlight. There were cobblestones and flagstones intermingled on these streets that had known the roll of Roman chariots. It was an old town; some of the building stones now used in the walls or foundations of its buildings had been in use when it was a Euboean colony, peopled eight hundred years before Christ by fugitives from Messina, then a Greek colony.
“Where is this abbey they refer to, do you know?” I asked Ines.
She shook her head bewilderedly. “I’ve never heard about it.” She smiled weakly, adding, “But then, I’ve led such a sheltered life-first protected from the realities of life by my father, then by my brothers—that I know very little of the world outside my own.”
Poor little rich girl. “We’ve got to find out, or we can’t go there,” I told her. “And I want very much to go.”
“Maybe we could follow the workers,” she suggested.
“Great. We walk around until we recognize somebody from the shipyards, then we trail after them.”
There had to be a better way, but I couldn’t think of it. So we went to our little room, Ines heated up some fish stew and I sliced thick chunks of peasant bread, and we sat down to chow together.
The night air was cool after the warm day, and so I suggested that Ines and I put on light cloaks that had hoods attached to them. We had no masks, but I figured the hoods would hide our faces until we saw what we were getting into. They were long black cloaks and hid us from the tops of our heads to our ankles.
Under her garment, Ines wore a black, ribbed wool jersey and slacks. I had donned stockings, garter-belt, and a light nylon mini-skirted dress. In case we had to doff those black cloaks and make a run for it, I wanted to be fully dressed.
Dusk was in the air as we came out onto the narrow street. In a little while it would be night and our dark cloaks would blend with the blackness, but there was still light enough to see us clearly and I thought to myself that we must look like a couple of monks with the hoods up over our heads and pacing along with the hems of the cloaks swinging about our ankles.
We headed toward the end of town and the little footpaths that led up into the forested hills. In the old days, almost all of Italy was heavily forested. A lot of those trees have been chopped down over the course of centuries, but here in Calabria, those woodlands were almost as virgin as they had been a thousand years before the founding of Rome.
There were Oaks and laurel, ilex and myrtle trees all about as as we moved up a narrow footpath. I hadn’t the faintest idea where we were headed, but Ines had suddenly remembered talk of an old abbey in these mountains founded by Robert Guiscard when he and his Normans conquered Calabria in the eleventh century. She thought it was known as the Abbey of Saint Mary of Egypt, but she wasn’t at all sure.
We were pretty high up in the hills when I saw two men in front of us, casually sauntering along. i caught Ines by an arm, yanked her back.
“I’ve seen them before,” I whispered to her hooded head. “But where? Recently, wait, let me think.”
We ran forward lightly on the hard-packed trail so I could get a better look at them. One was blonde, he looked like a German. The other man was thickly built and muscular. Of course!
“Don’t make a sound,” I breathed. “Those are Mafia button-men.”
Her face was pale inside the oval frame of her hood. “How can you tell?”
I explained how they had taken off in a black Fiat as soon as Silverfinger had left the shipyards. “I’m sure they’re his bodyguards. He left them behind when he went to talk to the workers, because he didn’t want to alarm anybody. Besides, he had nothing to fear from the working people.”
“Where do you think they’re going?”
“Same place we are, I’ll beta cookie.”
Ines stared at me. “But why? Surely they don’t worship the devil.”
“No, no. But there’ll be naked women in the abbey. Those devil-worshiping rites are hot stuff, honey. The boys and girls will be having themselves a ball with each other when the rites are over. And the Mafia boys want to get an eyeful.”
It was getting pretty dark by this time, but the Mafia musclemen had brought along a couple of flashlights and we were able to keep them in view by following their beams. The thought touched my mind that the hoodlums were here to do some spying for Silverfinger as well as play at voyeurism, but I said nothing of this to Ines. I didn’t want to unnerve her any more than she was, already.
The flashlight beams vanished. We were all alone on a black hillside with the full moon peeping down on us past some low clouds. I glanced up, saw the feathery branches of the trees overhead and pale moonlight seeping through those leaves and branches like eerie white shafts of some ghostly substance. Against my will, I shivered.
I made myself catch hold of Ines’s arm and shake her a little. She was breathing fitfully; I knew she was scared to death. It was a wild place, this hillside in the moonbeams, and I was conjuring up crazy ideas like bloody altars with human sacrifices tied down on them and chanting pagans worshiping the evil spirits of these woodlands.
If the atmosphere of this place so affected me, I could imagine what it was doing to Ines della Fanzio. She was shuddering steadily, half sobbing. Her legs were almost paralyzed with fright, so that I had to half push her to get her to move along the trail.
On every side, dark branches reached out to catch at our robes like inhuman hands. Twice Ines gave little cries when her cloak caught.
“Let’s go b—back, she pleaded. “I’m s—scared.”
“Not on your life,” I retorted, “We’ve come this far, we’re going to see what happens around here.”
She would never have dared go back down this hillside path by herself. I knew that, counted on it to make sure she went where I wanted her to go.
The tiny path grew narrower, the higher we went. At one time it may have been kept in repair by a goatherd or whoever it was whose business brought him this high into the hills. It had been long abandoned, it was little more than a walkway for one person. Briars and brambles snatched at us as we walked on toward the crown.
We saw the red glow before we reached the top of the path. And we heard the faint, Sonorous chanting like an echo out of some subterranean cellar. It was terrifying, that chant. The Latin words that mocked the ritual of the Mass exuded evil.
The devil worship had begun.
Chapter 5
A dull red haze hung in the air ahead of us. As we came to the crown of the hill, with the wind sighing in the trees all around, we found ourselves staring down into a little hollow cleared of trees and covered, for the most part, by some ancient ruins. There were stone arches in the Gothic style still standing, and parts of thick stone walls. Grass had grown between the paving-stones of the chapel, and the once-vaulted dome of the apse was long since gone, as were the cells of the monks and prior.
Only the chapel, which had been used as a church in those forgotten times, was still standing, if only partially. The altar was there, denuded now of its raiment and cloths, but its white marble shape bulked large in the red fire-flames leaping and dancing at both ends.
A naked girl lay on that altar. She had dark hair that hung down across part of the altar and on either side, while her full breasts rose and fell fitfully and her thighs moved a little in the flesh heat devouring her body. I was certain she had been fed some sort of aphrodisiac to insure her complete participation in the Black Mass which was being performed upon her naked body.
In front of her stood a defrocked priest—to celebrate the Black Mass, a defrocked priest is necessary—clad only in the elaborately decorated surplice, for under it he was stark naked. His hands held a golden chalice high even as he intoned the desecrating words backwards, in Latin.
There were more than a hundred men and women in the congregation. They wore black masks that hid their faces. Otherwise, they also were naked. And some of the men, I saw, were already affected by the sight of all the female nudity around them. I guess it was exciting, at that, to see a secretary or a bucket girl with whom you worked all week long, in the buff.
The women were affected, too. They cast sidelong glances at the erections that brushed against their thighs and buttocks from time to time, and once in a while I saw a woman drop her hand to clasp the rigid phallus of the man beside her.
Ines was making low sounds in her throat.
“It’s a Black Mass,” she whispered.
Well, she wasn’t quite as dumb as I’d thought her to be. I asked, “You ever fooled around with one of those?” I knew the jet set, of which she was a member, often went in for Satanism to get some kicks in their lives.
She shook her head.
The ex-priest was lowering the chalice, resting it on the belly of the naked girl. In just such a fashion had Madame de Montespan had a similar chalice placed on her own naked belly when she had had a Black Mass offered to recapture the affections of the king. At that mass, a child was killed as a sacrifice to the Prince of Darkness. There was no such sacrifice here. It was enough for these workingmen and women that they adored the devil by pampering their lusting flesh.
The naked girl lay outstretched on the stone altar, her pale flesh gleaming in the rays of the silver moon high above. Her big breasts rose and fell to the desires churning in her flesh, they quivered loosely when the ex-priest, in holding the chalice On her belly, occasionally paused to run his hand down into the thickly haired bush of her mons veneris.
The Black Mass had begun in the early Dark Ages, in those years when the serfs were downtrodden under the heels of the earls and barons who ruled their lands from their stone fortresses. There were the nobles, the priests, and the warriors. Beneath all these, lacking all independence, were the serfs who tilled the fields, who lived in thatched huts with the animals.
They had nothing to look forward to; even their brides, when they married, went to the lord of the manor in the ritual of jus primus noctae. In other words, to the baron who ruled him went the right of spending the wedding night with his wife. The Church rendered lip service to the serfs, assuring them that a Heaven was waiting for them when they died, but it did little or nothing for them while they were alive.
These peasants had bare, empty lives. The Christ they worshiped seemed to ignore them. And so they turned, in their frustrations and their angers, their desperation and their need, to the arch-enemy of Christ: Satan. Who celebrated that first Black Mass is not known. But someone did, in those days of plague and famine, drawing the poor people about an altar on which a naked woman, usually very lovely, very beautiful, lay spread out for the feasting of eyes that may never have seen a nude woman.
As many as six thousand celebrants have been reported at some of these medieval Black Masses. They flourished all over Europe. They had their roots in the paganism which still was nourished in the hearts of the serfs. Memories of the moon goddess, Diana, and the goat-footed god, Pan, still held sway in the tales handed down from father to son, from mother to daughter. It was a chance to throw off serfdom and become a human being.
In time, the ancient pagan worship gave way to an excuse for a carnal orgy. The Black Mass became, not so much an instrument whereby to worship the devil, but an opportunity for a man to flesh his erection in the genitals of a neighbor’s Wife on whom he had cast more than one lustful glance.
Today, the Black Mass is a way of getting kicks. The naked workingmen and women below me could not have cared less about the black candles illuminating the altar where the girl lay, nor the black host being elevated by the ex-priest. All they had eyes for was a pair of shapely breasts or buttocks, or an overdeveloped penis jutting from a man’s hairy loins. They rubbed one another, a man touched his penis-head to the crease of a woman’s buttocks, she caressed it with her behind in a promise to accept that male staff in her vulva when the messe noire was at an end.
And the Black Mass was nearing its end, below us.
The shadows of the broken pillars of the old chapel lay black across the pallid thighs of the girl on the altar, almost joining the shadow of the chalice as the defrocked celebrant lifted it to his lips to drink of the wine inside it. At the juncture of those white thighs, her pubic growth was like an even darker shadow, evoking lust and worship in the hearts of those who stood before that altar, chanting hoarsely.
From time to time the girl moved her head, her loose black hair rippling over her shoulders and across the cold altar stones. Her full mouth quivered, opened to wail, and was silent. The celebrant bent, kissed the naked belly of the overwrought girl, who gave a soft cry at the touch of those lustful lips. Then he was placing the chalice once again where his mouth had kissed, so that it rested on the living flesh of the woman before him.
The two Mafia button-men had gone down the hill slope so that they would have an even better view of the proceedings than we; they stood half hidden behind some bushes. I thought they meant to join the congregation, but were held back for some reason; perhaps because they didn’t want word of what they wanted to do to get back to Silverfinger. Still, they watched, and from time to time they nudged each other.
Now the congregation was stirring even more, they knew the rites were almost over, and soon this obscene mimicking of the holy mass would degenerate into an orgy of hot-blooded couplings of men and women. They waited for this moment, the wind stirred their black cloaks, blew away their panted breaths.
On the Calabrian hillside where I lay belly-down beside Ines della Fanzio, staring into the ruins of the chapel to Saint Mary of Egypt, I felt my own blood stir and throb, overhead the moon was a brilliant ball of silver, only a few clouds scudded by, and beyond them were a myriad stars staring downward as they must have stared throughout the centuries when evil was being done on this planet Earth.
