The Lizard's Bite

IT WAS 1961, A COLD SUMMER IN THE VALLE D’AOSTA. Bone-chilling mountain mists hung around the family chalet outside Pré-Saint-Didier in the Little St. Bernard Pass. A week had passed without sight of the rising bulk of Mont Blanc, separating this last wild piece of northern Italy from France and Switzerland, an aloof rocky giant, crowned with snow. The child, just turned seven, had felt lost without some view of the mountain. It was a consolation, during these long, lonely summer interludes, a kind of company for him. And that was the year—the very year, some odd external voice reminded him—when he needed company more than ever. The boy Leo was aware of himself, seated at the long, old wooden table, so roughly made it looked as if it had been shaped with an axe. Alone in the familiar living room. Yet not alone.

You never did look, the voice said. An old voice, familiar too.

I never wanted to.

It was, he somehow realised, himself speaking. Years older. Wiser too, perhaps. And sad. The child didn’t believe in ghosts. His father, a practical, unemotional accountant who handled money for many of the larger northern corporations, would have no room for such nonsense. He’d thrown away some of the books Leo brought home from boarding school. They were too fanciful, he said. Apt to give a child the wrong ideas. Arturo Falcone was, as he never failed to remind his son Leo, a self-made man. He’d risen out of the misery and chaos of World War II, putting himself through college working at night as a barman and waiter. Everything in little Leo Falcone’s life came from this odd, distant man, a father on paper only, a distant figure, seen only in the holidays, when he’d retire to a chair with a newspaper and a glass, to bury himself deep in his own thoughts. Leo was an only child, which made the gratitude he felt he owed his father for any attention whatsoever both more deserved, and more difficult to deliver.

The room was freezing. His parents had left him there with nothing but this curious voice, a more desolate echo of his own, for company.

He looked at the clock, an old Black Forest cuckoo clock. Like something from a dream, the pendulum hung still, trapped artificially on the right side of the housing, which was a copy of a wooden mountain chalet, very like the one in which Leo now sat, stiffly upright on a hard, uncomfortable chair, aware that the room was reverberating from some sound that had penetrated it from elsewhere, a booming, rolling, chiming noise, the metallic ring of bells followed by the lunatic chirrup of the cuckoo’s bellows.

They talked of avalanches here, in the winter. The mountains were perilous, solitary places. There were still bears, some said. And wild mountain men who would take a child just to enslave it, to put the stolen boy out into the fields to work the pastures, gone forever into a life of servitude, because someone had to work, always.

His father told him that last story. One night when he’d been bad. Or at least forgetful, leaving the key inside the glass front door, where any thief might smash the window, snatch it, put a hand through and enter. A stranger, an intruder, a man who could rip the fragile fabric of family apart with his hands.

Keys are what stand between decent people and chaos, Arturo Falcone told him, before he beat the boy Leo, with a relentless, chill deliberation that was, in some way, more painful because of the mental hurt it inflicted. Forget the keys and your little world dies, and you with it. Parents disappear. The lonely little boy from a cold, upper-middle-class family becomes a dirty mountain goatherd, abandoned to a life of misery and shame.

Better off dead, his father said.

Dead.

He hated that word as a child, even before he fully understood what it meant. From an early age Leo Falcone found he was able to read the faces of others, see behind their expressions and guess at what they were truly thinking. It was a kind of magic, the very sort his father would have beaten out of him had he known it existed. But exist it did, and Leo knew what went through the minds of men and women, all adults, all better than him, when they said the dead-word.

Terror.

A long, slow, uncontrollable sense of dread, one that wouldn’t disappear until something—some other more immediate concern or, in his father’s case, a bottle of mountain brandy—displaced it from their heads.

Dead.

The boy Leo found he was able to say the word himself, at this freezing, deserted table, and, for the first time, experience none of the sense of cold, inner foreboding he expected.

He drew the icy air into his lungs, two big, painful breaths, screwed up his face with an anger and force he would never have dared show had his father been present. Then he yelled . . .

Dead, dead, dead . . . DEAD!

There was a sound from high on the wall. The frozen pendulum on the clock moved, making a single swing from right to left before standing still again, defying gravity, defying everything that Leo had come to believe was solid, safe and natural in the world. Then it spoke again, that twin chorus, half metallic bell, half thunderous cuckoo roar, the very noise that had awoken him in this place.

It wasn’t just a cuckoo clock. He should have remembered.

The tiny wooden doors opened. From within, circling, circling, came two small round wooden figures. Husband and wife, he in mountain dress, leather leggings, a colourful shirt with braces, and a small green hat with a minute visible feather in it. She . . .

Leo blinked. He remembered both figures now. The woman was plump and bustling and comical, in a white dress with blue spots, a kindly, rosy face, set forever in a wooden smile.

This woman was gone. In her place was a large, naked figure, no higher than a finger, but made of flesh, real flesh, pink and white and flaccid in the way he’d noticed when his mother walked out of the bathroom wearing nothing, unaware he was there.

Real flesh with weals and wounds and blood, real blood, blood that spat and spurted out of her under the vicious, constant blows of the little man who circled, arms thrashing, blade flashing.

Little Leo blinked. The clock was changing, even as he watched.

Now the little man wore a surgeon’s mask and a close-fitting surgical cap. His arm worked feverishly, slashing, slashing.

Under the knife we go we go . . .

. . . someone, the older Leo, sadly laughing, said at the back of his head.

There was screaming too. Screaming from the little figures in the clock. Screaming from beyond this cold, cold room.

Little Leo’s eyes fell on the door, the solid wooden barrier that led to his parents’ bedroom, a place he feared, a place where he didn’t belong. There was a huge carved wooden heart on the crossbeam, a sign of love, he imagined, though it seemed somehow out of place. And now this heart, old polished oak, was beating, slowly, weakly, pumping with a feeble resignation that was audible, moving in rhythm with his own, frightened pulse.

Behind this palpitating wooden heart was their sanctuary, their private place in which a child was never allowed, no matter how much he needed them, how frightened he felt. There was no glass panel here, no window, nothing to allow anyone to glimpse what happened behind that solid, impassable wood. There was, too, no stupid, weak means to circumvent what was meant to be—safety, security, certainty—when you placed a key in the door and turned the lock.

The key was there, on the table, taunting him. Old black metal, fancily worked so that it felt awkward in the hand, too large for the clumsy fingers of a child that grasped at the sharp angles of the handle and failed to find purchase. Even if he dared. Their bedroom was forbidden territory. Leo had known that all his short life. What happened there was for them alone.

The bell and the roar of the cuckoo ripped through the air again. Leo watched the pendulum make a single crossing, from left to right, then stay stuck in time, spotted now with blood from the plump little female figure who thrashed and screamed and fought in her tiny, tightly defined circle of life on the porch of the carved clock.

Nothing stops the flailing man, he thought. Not the pendulum. Not the ghostly voice in his head. Not God Himself. Because the flailing man is a part of God too, the part that always comes in the end.

But he couldn’t say the words this time. The pendulum never moved. Some deep, primeval fear began to wake inside little Leo Falcone’s head, turn his bowels to water, make him want to sit on this old seat and pee himself out of terror.

“The past is past,” the older voice said. “Trust me.”

“So what do I do?” he asked, bitter, refusing to break down in tears because that always gave the adults some comfort, and would do so even when those watching, older eyes were his own.

“What you’ll always do. First and last. So much it will get in the way of everything else. Think!”

Leo waited and listened and tried to do as the voice said. He didn’t want to be in this place. He didn’t want to see behind the locked wooden door, with its crudely carved, dying heart, or use the big metal key on the table. More than anything, little Leo wished to sleep. To lay down his head on the table, close his eyes, think of nothing, embrace nothing but the dark which seemed, next to this crazed, inhospitable place, a warm and welcoming respite from the torments that were gathering around him.

“Please,” the old voice said, and it sounded terrified.