He pointed the dagger in my direction, in a gesture of condemnation. Whatever had I committed, I asked myself blubbering, to merit, not purgatory, but the irremediable horrors of hell? Four devils ran to me, seized me and forced me to the ground on my back, nailing me down with their horrid clawed arms. I did not scream: terror itself, choking my throat, prevented that.
Besides, said I to myself in a flash of desperate humour, who can hear the lament of the damned?
Their leader came to me. Even now, his face could not be seen, only the macabre hooked hand (likewise bluish and phosphorescent) brandishing the fiery dagger. Meanwhile, I knew not what had become of Atto and Sfasciamonti; I heard only an indistinct scuffling. Probably they too had been overcome in their turn.
The angel of evil leaned over and was upon me. With his dagger, he aimed directly at my forehead. He directed the tip just above my eyes, in the middle. He was about to penetrate the bony covering (or its appearance) with the overwhelming force of fire. Then, twisting the blade in the hole, he would stir and fry the grey matter of my brain.
"No," I implored, I know not if with thought alone or with the whisp of voice that I had been allowed to retain from my earthly life.
In the lightless abyss which was my executioner's hood, I thought I saw (the powers of darkness and their agents) a malign smile, which heightened my terror at the approaching end. The absurd heat of the blade dried my eyeballs (had I still any?). Only an animal lust for life still kept them open.
The point of the incandescent blade was less than a hair's breadth from my forehead. It was about to strike. Now, in less than a second. Now, yes, Cloridia my love, my sweet little girls…
It was then, as though in a gentle prelude to death, that I lost consciousness. Before fainting, heart and soul beat together for one last instant. Just long enough to hear:
"One momentary: periculous blunderbungle."
"What? Wretched imbecile, I'll blast you to bits!"
Then, violent noises, as of a struggle, and the shot.
"Take courage, hero, stand up."
A smack. Rapid, violent and alarming as a bucketful of water in the face. It had awoken me, recalling me from the torpor of my swoon. Now I heard Atto's voice addressing me.
"I… I do not…" I stammered, still prone, while my head seemed to be on the point of exploding. I coughed several times. There was a smell of burning, and smoke everywhere.
"Return among the living," Melani chanted to me. We must leave here before we are asphyxiated. First, however, let me present you Beelzebub. You will, I think, be surprised to find that you have already met."
Still trembling, I sat up. The bluish light no longer pervaded the cavern. Now all was yellow, red and orange: a torch had been lit, which illuminated the surroundings. I looked at my hands. I too no longer emitted that arcane phosphorescence.
"I have reloaded," I heard Sfasciamonti announce.
"Good," replied Atto.
I opened my eyes wide. The scene moments before, faced with which I had believed myself to have bid life farewell, had changed utterly.
In his right hand, Sfasciamonti brandished the dagger with which I was on the point of being put to death. He was pointing it at a little group of hooded demons, all huddled oh so quietly against the wall, without giving the faintest sign of resistance. Such discipline was not without cause: in his left hand the catchpoll held his ordnance pistol. Atto, for his part, grasped an improvised torch: a cone made up of sheets of paper which he had lit with the incandescent dagger and which now illuminated the narrow space in which we stood, while however spreading fumes that rendered the air unbreathable.
"Up, you wretch, and get us out of here," said Atto to the chief of the demons, placing a handkerchief across his nose in order not to breathe in too much smoke.
It was then that I recognised the leader of the infernal company. That foul, oversized covering, the odours of filth and decay spreading all around, those clawed hands…
The cowl shifted a little. Once more I beheld that crumpled parchment of a face, that miserable patchwork of bits of skin held together only by inertia, that tumescent cankered nose like a mouldy carrot, the evasive eyes, bloodshot and deceitful, the few broken yellow-brown stumps of teeth, the wrinkles deep as ploughed furrows, the skeletal cranium and the yellowish scalp from which hung resignedly a few rare tufts of rust-coloured hair.
"Ugonio!" I exclaimed.
It is necessary that I should at this juncture make clear the nature and history of the personage in question, as well as his companions, with whom it was my fate to share no few adventures many years ago.
Ugonio was a corpisantaro, one of those bizarre individuals who spend their lives searching Rome's subterranean innards for the relics of saints and of the first martyrs of the Christian faith. The corpisantari are truly creatures of darkness, whose time is spent grubbing with their bare hands underground, separating dirt from shards, earth from stones, splinters from mould, and exulting whenever this stubborn and meticulous labour of filtering reveals a mere fragment of a Roman amphora, a coin of the imperial age or a piece of bone.
They are wont to sell for a high price the relics (or corpisanctorum, whence their name) which they find in the subsoil, exploiting the good faith, or better, the unpardonable ingenuousness of buyers. The piece of amphora is sold as a fragment of the cup from which Our Lord drank at the Last Supper; the little coin becomes one of the thirty pieces of silver for which Judas Iscariot betrayed the Son of God; the sliver of bone is palmed off as part of Saint John's collarbone. Of all the vile substances that the corpisantari glean under the ground, nothing is thrown away: a half-rotten piece of wood is sold dear as an authentic splinter of the True Cross, a feather from a dead bird is auctioned as a plume from an angel's wing. The mere fact of spending a lifetime grubbing, piling up and archiving all that disgusting material has endowed them with a reputation as infallible hunters after sacred objects and thus guarantees them a large number of readily hoodwinked customers. Over a long period of time and thanks to the astute bribery of servants, they have accumulated copies of the keys to cellars and store rooms throughout the whole city, thus gaining access to all the most recondite recesses of subterranean Rome.
Surprisingly enough, the corpisantari combine their execrable practices with a genuine, intense, almost fanatical religiosity, which surfaces at the most unexpected moments. If my memory does not betray me, they have asked several pontiffs for the right to form a confraternity; but there has never been any response to that request.
So, Ugonio was one of their number. Being a native of Vienna, he spoke my language with inflections and accents which often made it difficult to discover any coherent sense behind the verbiage; hence his nickname, the German.
"The German…" I exclaimed, utterly astonished, turning to Ugonio. "So 'tis you!"
"I recognate not this disgustiphonous appellation, from which I dissocialise myself with my entire personage," he protested. "I commandeer the Italic tongue, not as an immigrunter, but as if 'twere my own motherlingo."
"Silence, beast," cut in Atto, who had already heard many years before how Ugonio loved to boast about his disastrous gibberish. "Just to hear you talk gives me nausea. So you have made your fortune with this Jubilee, cheating the pilgrims with your so-called relics, perhaps selling some ham bone at a good price as the tibia of Saint Calixtus. I hear that you have become a big noise. And now you've sold yourself to Lamberg, eh? But, what am I saying? Far from selling yourself, you are a true patriot. After all, you're Viennese and, as such, a faithful subject of His Imperial Majesty Leopold I, like that damned ambassador of yours. Bah, who would have guessed that I'd ever again in my life have to put up with your disgusting presence?" concluded Melani, spitting on the ground in disdain.