Haunted Mind

It began with a crack in the asphalt that had swallowed the road for hundreds of yards. Anyone who leaned over the edge would not have seen the bottom. We had no idea how or why, but we knew the roadblock at either end of the chasm had cut the villa off, and a thick, dense fog was rising, so thick that if we had invited a brass band to play on the roof, no one out there could have told where the sound came from. Outside the world, a nothing at the margin of nothing.

The occupation of Villa Clara was meant as a peaceful protest against the criminal state of housing policy. Picking a rusty old padlock and breaking a pane of glass had been easy enough, but the aftermath was proving harder than expected. Lavinia huffed into her phone all day long without ever getting through: user busy, unreachable, not answering, does not exist. Was it possible that every connection had gone down? We were in the flatlands outside Bologna, not among the ruins of Chiapporato.

Olmo went upstairs and came back down a few minutes later with his wool cap pulled low over his forehead and his upper lip curled upward, like a herring flopping about on its tail. He stopped halfway down the stairs, caught his breath, shook his head, and descended the last steps into the big room on the ground floor.

"Well?" I asked.

He looked at me, pensive. "I don't know when they were last here, but I hope they don't try to force our hand while we're in the house. Unwell people, anyway." Stella, meanwhile, was studying the interior spaces, pointing out this or that to be moved, memorizing everything as she scampered back and forth on those thousand feet of hers, in size-six shoes that looked borrowed from a dollhouse.

In the early afternoon two municipal police officers appeared at the gate on the edge of the crack, on foot, with a listless gait. Though we were plainly visible, they gave us the barest glance from outside, showed almost no interest, and walked on without deigning to look at us. Humiliating, I thought. We're off to a fine start.

The sun drowned in the fog, going out like a flaming club in a juggler's mouth. That first night we made do, sleeping in our sleeping bags thrown any which way over cardboard on the floor, and from that moment our stay at Villa Clara turned into a nightmare. Lavinia was the first to wake up screaming like a woman possessed. After her the same happened to each of us, though we hesitated to speak of it. As the hours sifted by like sand, night after night, the variations on the terrifying vision multiplied, the same for all of us, and it never loosened its grip on our sleep.

A dream of horrible, almost documentary realism. First a few shadows at the end of the road, standing out against the damp asphalt in the moonlight, sticks and knives growing clearer as they advanced. They wore black helmets and balaclavas, they sang, they laughed, and having reached the dreamer they beat him without fail, sinking deep into the flesh in a frenzy of shrieks and uproar. We could not tell victims from butchers, in the milky haze of the night light and the darkness inside the villa. In the dream we saw only splashes and smears of blood on the wall, on the floor, on the old out-of-tune piano. The same dream, for all of us.

For the first three nights we could not sleep at all. The moment any one of us dozed off he plunged back into the dreadful hallucination, and each time a new detail was added: an old print above the fireplace hood, a shard on the floor, always in the same place, where the same stone martens performed the same actions in the same sequence. A harrowing vision that seemed to spring from the ancestral memory of the place itself, infused straight into the unconscious.

The fear of falling back into the dream kept us awake, and insomnia began to gnaw at us from within like a silent woodworm, but at first no one spoke. Only on the fourth day did Lavinia resolve to bring it up. "I heard you all last night," she said, staring into the distance at the crack in the ground outside the villa, which seemed to widen by the hour. "You saw it too!" Dawn was filtering through the fog, faintly lighting the room. Amina retorted:

"Saw what?"

Lavinia drew a long breath and launched into an erudite panegyric on the oneirocritica of Artemidorus, the cult of Asclepius, and ritual incubation.

"Haven't you ever thought that our dreams might come from outside, breathed into us by some spirit, the soul of a dead man who can't find peace..." Olmo cut her off:

"The Horla, in short?" I smiled, thinking of Maupassant's delirium, devoured by syphilis, imprisoning in paper the specter of his paranoid madness. I joined the conversation:

"Resonance, Lavinia. In dreams we ruminate on unconscious thoughts. It's hardly strange that a collective of five comrades, bound to a common project, should have similar experiences."

"Yes, but if that were so we wouldn't all dream exactly the same thing, each of us would live it in our own way! There are no two perfectly identical memories in this world. Our dream has every appearance of coming from a common matrix. A real event." Amina and Stella signaled the rest of us not to insist. Their friend was nervous, frightened, and no one was going to talk her out of her conviction.

Meanwhile the nocturnal vision went on tormenting our sleep, ever sharper, ever more detailed, more disturbing, while the outside world's indifference toward us drained our motivation and wore down our will. In the following days the two officers walked in through the gate of Villa Clara several times, climbed to the upper floors swinging their flashlights in the half-dark, and kept on not deigning to look at us. As if we weren't there.

After thirty-six hours awake, the lack of sleep began to produce embarrassing effects on us. During the day we had no strength to do anything, and the terror of falling back into the abyss of the nightmare kept consciousness from surrendering to the arms of Morpheus, so that no one ever really slept. We never went back to Lavinia's theories. We were tempted to give up the occupation when, on the fifth night, those two boys arrived. They could have been fifteen, give or take, beautiful as passion itself: one a bright blond, probably bleached, the other raven-haired. They slipped warily into the big room late at night, holding hands. They flew on the wings of love, and not even they noticed us. I clearly made out the shadows of their profiles drawing close in the darkness, their lips touching, the two very young bodies kissing and knotting together with voluptuous abandon. We were in the shade, and we let them be, looking away.

Then it all happened, so fast that none of us could react. We saw them slip in through the window, two, three, five people with their faces covered by balaclavas, scarves, handkerchiefs, dark glasses, helmets, armed with sticks and knives. A fury. They burst in screaming at the two adorable turtledoves, who, terrified, tried to get to their feet, only to be kicked and shoved down.

One minute, two at the most. A slaughter. I tried to rise, to intervene, to disarm them and carry the boys to safety, when I realized that I knew those five killers. They were the very ones from the visions that haunted our nights. Every detail matched.

My body would not respond when I tried to stand, and at that precise moment I stopped embellishing the reality that my consciousness had refused to see for who knows how many hours. I felt as if I were emerging from a long swoon, and everything was suddenly clear: we had entered the villa five days earlier, and on the first night a patrol had attacked us, and after beating us half to death had thought it best to leave us there to die, to rot. We did not die, though the infections from our wounds and our internal fractures had brought on high fever, delirium, unconsciousness. In the days that followed we had lain inert, incapable of any reaction, suspended between sleep and waking. The others beside me were in the same condition. Rolling my eyes, I could barely see them. My mind had gone on reliving the moment of the assault.

Before those animals could cut the throats of the two chosen kids, powerful lights blazed on from outside, flooding the room with daylight. Those butchers had no way out. I had barely time to make out the shadow of the uniformed squad coming in to disarm and arrest them. One of the officers, inspecting the premises, spotted the rest of us in the shadows and called an ambulance. It arrived just in time.

Sometimes reality sends signals we refuse to understand. The dream is a vital message struggling desperately to rise to the surface. So it had been in those horrible nights: I had embroidered on reality, going on living in a dimension from which I might never have returned. I don't know how the others lived it. We haven't seen one another since.

A year for full recovery, no permanent damage. In the hospital the officers who had rescued me came to visit. They were the very ones, the two municipal cops I had seen in my fever strolling indifferently through the garden. They had been investigating the gang for some time. I asked them about the crack outside Villa Clara, and they looked at me in surprise, since no crack had opened in the ground. Not that they knew of. It had existed only in my mind, twisted in the spasm of agony, where the awareness of impending death had translated itself into the image of a pit swallowing the world of the living into that of the dead.