The creatures I saw the priest pursuing across the hillside in the twilight were unlike anything I had ever seen before. Monstrous things, with forms seemingly alien to our planet. I saw tentacles and proboscises, long spines and eyes—countless hideous eyes—and I was at a loss to account for it. How he had come by this grotesque menagerie, I had no idea—until one day, reluctantly, he explained the whole thing to me.
In this story an Italian priest performs bizarre unholy experiments in the crypt of his church, involving apparently alien creatures.
I began attending church after my wife died. She was very ill for five years and by the time she died, I was already a complete wreck from years of nursing her and helplessly watching her suffering, even aside from the bitter sting of her passing.
The people going in and coming out of the church always looked so happy. I wanted some of that.
That probably explains why I, an avowed atheist, began going to Sunday mass.
I wasn’t curious. I didn’t want to explore how I felt about religion. I was just gravitating towards something cheerful, like a starving man gravitates towards food.
Unless you’ve experienced it, you can’t imagine what it does to you, to watch someone you love deeply gradually deteriorate and die over a period of years, all the while in terrible worsening pain.
The congregation of St. Marco’s was a youngish crowd, which was weird considering the church’s remote location, nestled in the mountains. They came from miles around to attend the Sunday service.
Perhaps I first went there out of curiosity as much as loneliness. By then I was completely fluent in Italian. Our Tuscan dream had died with my wife, but I had no particular inclination to return to England.
I saw immediately, sitting there on the uncomfortable hard wooden bench, why the church was drawing such a crowd. The priest was a mesmerising speaker.
Something about him suggested a degree of nervous exhaustion, and yet during his sermons, that entirely disappeared, to be replaced only with a boyish enthusiasm.
Certainly, strong Christian themes underpinned his sermons, but his sermons ranged far and wide over an incredible array of topics. I was sure he had undergone scientific training of some kind, because he spoke eruditely and accurately on everything from evolution to the theory of relativity to Malthus and nitrogen fixation, and somehow tied it all brilliantly to his Catholic faith.
Once I’d heard him speak, I never missed a Sunday mass—except once, when I was ill with food poisoning. If more priests were like him, I thought to myself, the churches would all be full.
Did listening to his sermons deter me from atheism? Yes and no. His religion still sounded quite crazy to me. I can’t help that. It’s not a judgement upon its practitioners. On the contrary, I have every respect for them. It’s simply a description of the feeling the religion conjured within me. I will admit, however, that Padre Montecchio succeeded in opening my eyes to the fact that materialism is not without its flaws and may well be deeply lacking as a complete explanation for life and the universe.
I had been attending the church for perhaps five or six months when I finally understood, from talking to other members of the congregation, that the church was technically not, strictly speaking, Catholic.
That is, while Padre Montecchio espoused a faith that to me appeared indistinguishable from Catholicism, in fact he was theoretically independent of the Catholic hierarchy, at least to some extent, and the church building itself was owned by an obscure trust of some sort.
And yet, Montecchio’s church did somehow fall under the purview of the Catholics, and a bishop visited the church from time to time.
Even now, the situation isn’t completely clear to me.
I never exchanged more than a few words with Montecchio himself.
That is, until after the evening of Friday April 5th, 2013. I made a careful note of the day in my journal, which my wife had persuaded me to keep.
I was out walking on a misty evening around dusk, when I happened upon an astonishing sight. Padre Montecchio was running across the field, dressed in typical priestly robes, attempting to catch a creature that was scuttling along with impressive speed. The creature was heading almost in my direction.
At first I though the creature to be a dog or perhaps a pig, but as I began to run towards it, I realised I absolutely couldn’t tell what it was. I began to think it might be a small deer, but it wasn’t that either. I jumped on it and caught hold of it, then when I actually looked at it, I received a terrible shock that caused me to drop it in alarm.
The creature indeed resembled a dog somewhat, and was covered in wiry black hair, but it had six eyes and no nose. Two large black eyes were in the centre of its head above a wide, curved mouth; there were two smaller eyes above those, and two more eyes at either side of these. The mouth opened to reveal surprisingly human-like teeth. When I dropped it, it immediately tried to run off, but Montecchio caught it with a net.
“Thank you.” he said to me.
“What is it?” I asked him.
“It’s from Peru.” he said. “A kind of aquatic monkey. They’re happier in the sea.”
And with that, he hurried back to the church.
The creature was clearly not from Peru and it clearly wasn’t any sort of monkey, aquatic or otherwise.
After that I began to keep a careful eye on Montecchio, and I spoke to him whenever he’d allow me a little of his time. He was up to something weird, and I wasn’t sure what. I wondered if it was possible that he was participating in some kind of strange genetics experiment. That seemed the best explanation. Perhaps he had a friend who happened to be a scientist and he was looking after this scientist’s creations, presumably in the back of the church somewhere, or the crypt.
I saw him chasing creatures across the hillside a couple of further times. What they were, or where they came from, I couldn’t imagine.
Among the congregation at the church was a man I disliked intensely. The only people who did like him were the elderly ladies whom he was always buttering up, and there were rumours that he’d persuaded more than a few of them to add him into their wills.
His name was Adelmo and he always took care to dress imaculately, and was always surrounded by an adoring crowd of elderly women. His wife hung around in the background and often seemed to have bruises on her face, which she explained by telling people that she was clumsy and prone to falling down the stairs, but the rumour was that Adelmo had a vicious temper.
Naturally the old ladies denied this vigorously if you so much as approached the topic even very indirectly. They knew of the rumour and felt that it was put about only by people who were jealous of Adelmo’s success. Adelmo certainly seemed wealthy by local standards, and lived with his wife in a large well-kept house in the village.
The couple had several grown-up children who lived in Milan and Rome and visited them very infrequently.
As it happens I received direct confirmation of the rumours swirling around Adelmo one evening when I happened to pass his house on one of my evening strolls. I distinctly heard shouting from within the house; the couple were in the middle of some sort of argument, but Adelmo’s wife, Chiara, sounded like she was justifying herself or pleading with him rather than attacking him. I paused for a moment and distinctly heard her cry out as though he had hit her.
The episode left me with an increasing feeling that Adelmo really needed taking down a peg or two. What fairness is there in life if a man like him can have a gaggle of old ladies fawning over him and probably leaving him money in their wills, when at the same time he’s brutalising his wife?
No-one in the village seemed able to tackle him about his behaviour. After all, the old ladies wielded considerable influence and he buttered them up expertly.
I mention this man because Montecchio and I were soon to get mixed up with him in a very unpleasant fashion, ultimately resulting in Adelmo’s life taking a very unexpected turn.
About a month after I’d helped Montecchio catch the creature, I happened to visited the old church in the evening while on one of my strolls. I had—and really still have—no idea what priests do in the evening, and whether they are likely to be found in their churches or not, but for some reason I had the idea that the church was quite empty.
I went in thinking I’d sit for a bit and see if I could hear any odd sounds. If Montecchio spotted me he’d naturally just assume I was doing a quiet bit of praying or contemplation.
For a while the church was silent. I sat there for perhaps twenty minutes. Ordinarily, if there’s no service on, the most I can stand on those uncomfortable pews is about half an hour, so I was reaching the end of my patience with it, my back already complaining vociferously.
Then I heard a shout, and a terrible inhuman wailing. This latter noise completely set my nerves on edge. I had never heard anything quite like it. It sounded like some obscure rainforest animal being tortured.
I was sitting there frozen, wondering what to do, when a door burst open somewhere to the side of the church and a thing emerged from it.
I don’t know what this thing was. I still don’t know. In colour it was a pinkish-white, with some portions veering towards red. It was about the height of a short human being. I can say that it definitely had two legs, which were short and stubby and immensely thick and wrinkled. Above that were a mass of things that looked like immensely long teeth, topped with two enormous red-rimmed eyes, of a pale pink colour. Truly a grotesque sight.
I was immobilised by fear and shock, unable to rise to my feet as it scuttled towards me, those massive stubby feet pounding the floor.
Then Montecchio emerged behind it wielding a double-barrel shotgun, and shot the thing in the back. It emitted one enormous last shriek and fell on its face, its momentum carrying it forwards a few feet, the teeth-like things making a clinking sound as they hit the stone floor.
Then, finally, I was liberated from my state of shock and I sprang to my feet.
Montecchio saw me and froze.
“I know how this must look.” he said.
“What, in the name of God, are you doing back there with these creatures?” I asked, my words amplified by my emotional state, and by the echo of the church. It’s fair to say that I was absolutely horrified and felt a kind of righteous anger that seemed to emerge spontaneously and uncontrollably in me.
“It’s nothing.” he said. “Please, don’t tell anyone.”
He lowered the shotgun and began to examine the beast.
“I demand to know what’s going on here.” I said, and I added something about informing the police.
My own words didn’t make much sense, even to me. I’ve no idea what I would have said to the police, or whether the whole thing was even a police matter, but the sight of the creature followed by Montecchio and his gun and the whole thing preceded by that unearthly shriek, had absolutely unhinged me.
He sighed, and rubbed the side of his head with his hand, as if wrestling with strong emotions.
“Very well.” he said. “First, can you help me get this thing back downstairs?”
“Downstairs?”
“We need to take it back to the crypt and send it back where it came from.”
For a moment I thought to question him further, but then I said, “Va bene” and together we began to drag the thing into the side room.
It was tremendously heavy. To get it down the stairs we had to attach ropes to the legs, so we could drag it down. The far end of the crypt was curtained off, I noticed, with black velvet curtains.
After we’d finished getting it down the stairs, we had to go back and collect a whole bunch of the teeth-like protuberances that had broken against the stone stairs on the way down. I noticed they were hollow, and the insides of them were a faint pinkish colour.
The worst thing about the creature was its enormous lidless eyes. They gave me quite a few nightmares in the weeks that followed.
“What you’re about to see is an abomination.” Montecchio said to me. “It shouldn’t exist, but it does. The guilt is mine. I’m unable to undo what I’ve done.”
“What are you talking about?” I said, and I would have added “man” for emphasis if we’d been speaking in English.
He went over to the curtains and pulled a cord at the side. They swept back to reveal what I can only describe as a hole, except it seemed to hover in mid-air. Inside the hole I could see only vague twisted shapes, resembling the branches of dead trees and the dim outlines of rocks.
“What is it?” I asked him.
“I created it.” he said, and he gestured at the surroundings of the hole. Only then did I properly notice a substantial collection of electronic and mechanical apparatus.
“You know, there’s a long tradition of clergy discovering things.” he said. His voice was uneven; his tone was that of a man trying to justify himself. It was as if he was confessing to a murder. “Bacon, Zamboni, Mendel, Copernicus—well, there are many of us.”
“And what have you discovered, exactly?” I asked, bewildered.
Here his natural enthusiasm began to take over; the same enthusiasm that I had been so impressed by in his sermons.
“You see, I became obsessed with metaphysics. I became convinced that Hume was wrong, but I wasn’t convinced by Berkeley either, and Kant did not provide me with salvation. All of them were working without the benefits of modern physical theory. For a while I was taken in by solipsism, but then I hit upon it—the solution to the metaphysical dilemma. I sought to test my theories—of course I did—and I purchased the necessary apparatus with some money that had been left to me. I spent not a penny of church funds on my research, I assure you.”
He was working himself up marvellously, and I hadn’t the heart to interject, although I badly wanted him to explain the mysterious hole that inexplicably floated right in front of us, or the hideous creature that we’d just dragged down the stairs. The matter of whether he had or hadn’t spent church funds on whatever this was seemed rather insignificant to me.
“I began to think that space itself is an illusion. We are not in a simulation, no—that’s an absurd idea—but space is not what it appears to be. Vast distances and the microscopic—they are one and the same! Perhaps my ego ran away with me. I believed I was doing the work of God!”
Now he adopted a kind of desperate imploring tone. I was beginning to worry that he might suddenly attack me. He seemed awfully upset about something, to the point of being more than a little deranged.
“I believe I alone have solved the fundamental problem of metaphysics; the question of whether a tree that falls unobserved really falls or not. But—”
He paused, almost on the verge of tears.
“I made a terrible mistake in my work. Hubris! Certainly I am guilty of that. I beg God for forgiveness every day! May God’s mercy pardon me from this mortal sin! I have opened a portal to Hell itself, and I can’t close again!”
For some moments I remained silent as he wrung his hands and wiped tears from his eyes.
“A … portal to Hell?” I said faintly.
“As good as.” he said. “At least, a portal to a distant world that appears inhabited by the most grotesque demons. It may be—one can only hope—some sort of distant planet, with little real metaphysical significance. Only, I can’t figure out how to seal the thing up. It’s feeding on itself. It’s self-sustaining. Oh! We have to throw this vile creature back into it. Will you help me?”
“Let’s do that now and we’ll talk about it later.” I suggested.
Together we attached ropes to the thing’s head, if it can be called a head, and then swung it back and forth until we could gather the necessary momentum to swing it clean into the hole. I heard it land on the other side with a crunching of its sabre-like exterior teeth, or whatever they were.
“Let’s go to your house.” I said.
“At any moment something else could get out!” he said desperately.
“Leave it for the moment.” I said, ushering him away from the hole.
I closed the curtains and led him, protesting, up the stairs and back to his house, which was a thing of quite ancient construction, behind the church.
There, he sat down on an old sofa, quivering. I had the sense of a man absolutely at the end of his tether.
There had been times, during his sermons, when I had suspected that the man carried some terrible burden, but on the whole he had been doing a remarkable job, I realised, of presenting a front to the world.
“Do you have anything to drink?” I asked. “I mean, alcoholic?”
“Only the communion wine.”
“That’ll do.” I said.
I poured us both a glass, since I also was feeling distinctly on edge. The portal had been quite the revelation.
“Now, you’re telling me, you performed some kind of research in physics, and you’ve opened some sort of portal to a distant planet, and you can’t close it, and things keep coming through it?”
“Exactly.” he said, drinking the wine gratefully.
“These things, are they dangerous?”
“They took my dog.” he said. “Poor Mavi! Probably it’s only a matter of time till they kill a person. I can’t control them. I keep chasing them down. I’ve secured the church but they’re ferociously intelligent. They alway find a way —”
He was working himself up again.
I made shushing sounds, as if talking to a child.
“It’s OK.” I said. “I’m here now. I’ll help.”
“Will you?” he said, clutching suddenly at my arm.
“Of course.”
“Thank you, my friend, thank you.”
Unfortunately, no means immediately suggested themselves by which we could close this wretched thing. I made numerous suggestions, ranging from dousing it with water to lighting a strong fire underneath it, and even to burning down the entire church, and he assured me he’d already thought of those things and nothing would work.
Finally I proposed what I thought was a very reasonable plan: we would simply brick the crypt up. But Montecchio was worried about any delivery of bricks attracting attention and wouldn’t agree to it. After a lot of debate I persuaded him that we could seal up the crypt just using stones and cement. The stones could be collected discretely from the nearby hillside, where there were plenty, and the cement would only require that I go and purchase a bag of cement powder in the town. No-one need ever cotton on to what we were doing.
Montecchio stressed about the bishop arriving and asking about the crypt, which sounded unlikely from what I could understand about this bishop. In any case, as far as I could work out, this bishop had no real authority over Montecchio or his church. Montecchio consistently refused to clarify the exact nature of the connection between his church and the Catholics, so I could never be completely sure about it.
In the end I convinced him that, were that to happen, he could just tell the bishop the crypt roof had fallen in, and he’d bricked it up for safety. At worst that would attract a mild censure for not going through proper official channels, if such channels even existed.
After that, every time I went on an evening stroll, I would fill a backpack with stones from the hillside and take them to the church, where we piled them up in preparation for walling off the crypt. Often I’d only fetch only one single large stone, but I figured that, over maybe six months, we’d accumulate enough of them to do the job.
I took care to avoid people and I was never asked where I was going in the evening with a heavy backpack. Usually I went after dark, using a head light on a strap around my head so I could see where I was going.
When we estimated we’d collected half the stones we needed, we built half the wall. Then when we’d collected half of what we still required, we built another quarter. We had three-quarters of a sturdy wall and everything was going well … until it wasn’t.
I arrived at the church one night after dark with my backpack filled with stones, my head lamp lighting the way, and I was about to go in, expecting to find Montecchio waiting for me, when I was stopped short by a voice.
“There are some strange things going on around here and I’d like an explanation.”
It was Adelmo. It turned out that he’d spotted Montecchio chasing some monstrosity across the hillside one evening—mercifully the creatures from the portal at least seemed averse to light and had never got loose during the day—and had begun snooping around. He’d observed me collecting stones and taking them to the church, and now he wanted answers.
All of this he gave me to understand in short order, finishing with, “Well?”
“None of it’s any of your business.” I told him.
“I should say it’s more my business than your business.” he said. “You’ve been here less than two years, haven’t you? I’ve been here closer to threescore and ten.”
The threescore and ten bit is the closest I can get in English to the odd phrasing of the words he actually uttered, which I recognised as a reference to the 90th Psalm, quite typical of the pompous way he had about him.
“That still doesn’t make it your business.” I told him.
“Let’s go inside and ask the Padre, shall we?” he said, his voice all smug and oily. How I detested the man.
“Let’s not.” I said, but he pushed the door of the church open, and I had no choice but to simply follow.
My heart almost stopped when I saw what was inside. There was Montecchio, and he was standing over the corpse of a creature he’d shot, looking down at it, while it jerked spasmodically, gradually dying.
The creature resembled a giant spider, half the height of Montecchio himself, except its legs resembled the legs of a crab. It was a revolting off-white in colour and it had no discernible head, but only eyes arranged all around its circumference.
Montecchio jumped when we came in.
“It tried to eat me.” he said, as if that explained everything, and gave the creature a powerful kick, flipping it onto its back.
On its underside was a kind of octagonal mouth, eight saw-edged triangular sections meeting in the centre, opening and closing with a horrible clicking sound.
Adelmo paled.
“I’m calling the police.” he said.
“No! Please!” Montecchio shouted, as Adelmo turned to go back outside. “Wait!”
Adelmo wasn’t waiting, but Montecchio hurried over to him and grabbed him by the arm.
“Get off me!” Adelmo shouted, in a tone of voice a teacher might have used with a child exhibiting extremely bad behaviour.
I stepped swiftly between Adelmo and the door.
“At least give us a chance to explain.” I said.
“Get out of my way.” he said.
“I won’t.” I told him, and for moment I thought he was about to hit me.
“Let us explain, Adelmo.” said Montecchio. “After that, if you still want to go to the police, we won’t stop you.”
“You can’t stop me.” said Adelmo, outraged by the suggestion that we even had the power to stop him going to the police.
“Exactly.” I said, hurriedly. “We can’t stop you. We just want you to have all the facts.”
“Very well, get on with it, then.” he said.
We had no choice. We took him down to the crypt and explained everything to him.
For a man who prided himself on his supposed Christian charity, Adelmo surprised us with his nakedly hostile tone. He wasn’t understanding at all.
“I’ve always had my doubts about you, Montecchio.” he said. “I shall have to report this to the church authorities and I’ve no doubt they’ll finally replace you. This is an egregious and heinous misuse of church property.”
Privately I wondered whether Adelmo understood the quasi-independent status of Montecchio’s church. I certainly didn’t.
“I was only doing a little research.” Montecchio protested. “It got out of hand—that’s my fault—but my work could have benefited the whole of humanity. It still could.”
“And you a priest.” said Adelmo. “I’m sure the bishop will be delighted when we explain all this to him. I’ve certainly never heard of a member of the clergy who behaves like this! Absolutely pathetic.”
His tone was sarcastic and mocking.
“I’m uncovering the work of God himself!” said Montecchio, tears in his eyes. “There is nothing unchristian about my work!”
The two stood there arguing, Adelmo increasingly insulting and sarcastic, poor Padre Montecchio pleading with him desperately to keep the whole thing a secret.
Meanwhile I heard an odd clumping sound emerging from the portal, like the footsteps of a large animal. I tried to warn them but they were so wrapped up in their argument that they paid me no attention. I began to back away and I urged Montecchio to do the same, but he only shouted “un attimo!” at me and carried on trying to defend himself.
I couldn’t actually see anything through the portal so I thought perhaps it often made such noises, and I was worrying unnecessarily, but then—quite suddenly, an enormous white tentacle covered in reddish suckers shot out and wrapped itself around Adelmo’s head, and began dragging him into the portal.
We tried to free him, fruitlessly. The thing was immensely strong. Adelmo made a terrible shrieking noise; I think the tentacle was stinging him. It was covered in small barbs in-between the suckers. We wrestled helplessly with the thing, getting stung quite a bit ourselves, as it dragged him into the portal. Montecchio discharged his gun directly into the portal but the result was only a terrible trumpeting sound, and the tentacle didn’t relax at all; in fact it only tightened on Adelmo. Montecchio hastily reloaded and positioned the gun to try to shoot at the tentacle itself, but it retracted abruptly, pulling Adelmo clean into the Hell-world.
He carried on shrieking from the other side, but all we could see was some faint dark shapes.
“We have to go in and help him!” said Montecchio.
“We can’t go in there! We’ll never get back again!” I told him. “There’s no point three of us dying instead of one!”
I’ll admit my attitude was probably coloured by my dislike of Adelmo. I wasn’t going to risk my life to save that miserable old charlatan.
“I’m going in!” said Montecchio, and he stuck the gun in a holster on his back and backed up so that he could take a run at the portal and jump into it.
“Don’t do it!” I implored him. “You’ll die in there!”
He ran at the portal nonetheless. Just as he was about to spring into it, another creature shot out of the portal and landed on Montecchio, knocking him off his feet.
“Mavi!” he exclaimed.
The creature was none other than Montecchio’s lost dog, which some unholy beast or other had dragged into the portal months earlier.
Mavi seemed surprisingly well-fed and there was blood around his mouth, so I gathered he had managed to hunt quite effectively over there. He and Montecchio made a tremendous fuss of each other, Montecchio having apparently forgotten about Adelmo in the heat of the moment, Mavi yapping and wagging his tail like a lunatic.
Then a strange fizzling sound arose from the portal, like something from a firework display, causing all of us, Mavi included, to jump back away from this new potential horror.
Mavi began to bark crazily, all his hair standing up.
At first I wasn’t sure if I was seeing what I thought I was seeing, but soon there could be no doubt about it: the portal was steadily diminishing, shrivelling up. As we watched, it gradually shrank until it completely disappeared with one final anticlimactic pop.
Adelmo, needless to say, was lost forever.
The police investigated, and in the following days a huge search was initiated, complete with a helicopter and over fifty volunteers. We admitted Adelmo had visited the church, but we told the police and everyone else that he’d left again and we hadn’t seen where he’d gone.
This was technically true, and so Montecchio felt that God would understand the slight deception.
The fact is, people go missing all the time in the mountains. A man can set off on an evening stroll, intending only to take a path he’s taken many times before. Then perhaps he decides to take a side-route, and somewhere along the way he stumbles and falls into a ravine. He tries to climb out, but he’s injured, and in the end he gives up and passes out.
A search party can pass within metres and not find his body, covered by vegetation.
Within weeks, animals have consumed his flesh and scattered his bones and clothing, and anything that’s left of him quickly gets buried in the forest floor.
It happens all the time, so no-one was really all that surprised by Adelmo’s complete disappearance. It was unusual, yes, but impossible? No.
Montecchio wanted to get rid of his apparatus and give the research up, but I persuaded him that he should continue. His research really could benefit all of humanity. And after all, if Mavi had reappeared, perhaps one day we might be able to get Adelmo back also. Not that I really want him back, if I’m honest.
At any rate, to this day Montecchio tinkers with his apparatus in the crypt. We have built a strong wall of stone and cement, with a locking metal hatch, just in case he accidentally opens another Hell-portal that he can’t close.
Frankly, the chances of ever retrieving Adelmo, or even his corpse, seem remote. Perhaps it’s better that way. His wife seems happier without him, and I’ve noticed her children visit her more often now.
