Black Tea and Other Tales Read online

  Samuel Marolla

  Black Tea

  and other tales

  Acheron Books n.1

  Publishing Director: Adriano Barone

  ISBN epub: 9788899216009

  ISBN mobi: 9788899216016

  Italian editing by Adriano Barone

  Translation from Italian by Andrew Tanzi

  English editing by Benjamin Kane Ethridge

  Cover by Diramazioni.it

  Introduction by Gene O’Neill

  Ebook Publishing by Matteo Poropat

  Copyright “Black Tea and other Stories” © 2014 Acheron Books

  Copyright “A box of lovely dark chocolates” (Introduction) © 2013 Gene O’Neill

  All rights reserved

  Acheron Books – www.acheronbooks.com

  Samuel Marolla was born and lives in Milan (Italy). He’s a genre writer and a businessman.

  His genre stories (both fiction and comics) are published by several Italian publishers.

  In 2014 he founded the digital publishing company Acheron Books, in order to broadcast the Italian genre fiction worldwide.

  His website is www.samuelmarolla.com.

  Acheron Books

  Website: www.acheronbooks.com

  Introduction

  A box of lovely dark chocolates

  by Gene O’Neill

  I usually shudder when a friend recommends an unfamiliar writer to me to read. For a couple of personal reasons. I already have a TBR stack that totters upward clear to the ceiling. But perhaps more important, approaching a book by an unknown writer is indeed like opening a box of chocolates. You never know what you are going to get.

  But when the recommendation includes a request for an introduction, the unsettled feeling has an added dimension. Because in this day of so much self-published work, unedited on the internet, it’s more than just possible that this particular box of recommended chocolates might not contain all the best and freshest ingredients. The candy maker perhaps not even a journeyman. I’d never read or even heard of Mr. Samuel Marolla.

  So it was with some trepidation that I began the first story, “Black Tea,” in Mr. Marolla’s collection. Only a few minutes into the first story, I realized my fears were without merit. The candy maker was indeed skilled, more than a journey man, perhaps even a master craftsman.

  Mr. Marolla’s prose is richly textured, sensory details concretely described. In fact, at some point near the end of the three long stories, I realized the literary quality reminded me quite a bit of the American writer, Thomas Ligotti. But sometimes a Ligotti story can be so dense and convoluted, it is difficult to access. Also another quibble is that a Ligotti story is often short on plot, focused mostly on voice, tone, and mood.

  These stories by Mr. Marolla are completely accessible and definitely have intriguing plots. So after finishing the last story, I decided that Mr. Marolla shared a characteristic with one of my favorite writers, Ted Klein. Mr. Klein often uses a slow buildup, rich in sensory detail, the plot slowly evolving. But, as the intriguing plot is revealed, there is an increasing sense of almost unbearable ominous foreboding. These three stories by Samuel Marolla share these Ted Klein characteristics.

  Each story contains a special surprise, like a tasty nougat in the heart of a chocolate:

  Black Tea: A surreal and disturbing central image.

  Crocodiles: A recipe for an unusual blood-red wine.

  The Janara: Ah, the rules, the rules, we must all follow the rules.

  So, I found this box of candy to be made of the tastiest ingredients, covered in only the finest, richest, and very dark chocolate. All this blended by a master craftsman. BLACK TEA and other tales by Samuel Marolla has my enthusiastic recommendation. I will watch for his byline in the future.

  -- Gene O’Neill, THE BURDEN OF INDIGO

  Black Tea

  The "principal lodger" of Jean Valjean's day was dead

  and had been replaced by another exactly like her.

  I know not what philosopher has said:

  "Old women are never lacking.

  Les Miserables, Victor Hugo

  The man walked through the shadows, over crimson carpets, past the mesmerizing patterns plastered on the walls. The air was sultry with no windows or other apertures, just a never-ending progression of forking, dead-end hallways, scattered with dust-laden mirrors, stairs leading nowhere, vaulted arches groaning under concrete masses. The wallpaper concealed other doors leading to cubbyholes and more empty rooms. Dark shelves held up old trinkets thick with dust. The plank ceiling was moldy. Sunlight had been foreign to this place for years.

  He looked down at himself, touching his clothes that clung to him like a second skin. He was wearing an Elite Maintenance waistcoat suit, a white T-shirt, baggy dark-blue cotton pants and work boots. He couldn’t remember his own name but he had a nagging feeling in his mind – a glimmer of consciousness dimmed by that still air in those dull, vacant hallways. Who was he? Where was he? And why?

  He rummaged through his pockets and found a folded, squared notepad sheet with the Elite Maintenance heading at the top. Right in the middle, large capital words ground onto the sheet with a red marker:

  DON’T TRUST THE OLD LADY!

  SHE WANTS TO KILL YOU!

  The man stood there staring at the words, his hands damp and trembling. What-the-fuck was going on here? An electric fever flamed up in his temples as he considered everything over again. He was some sort of special-maintenance technician. He and his team had been sent to do a job but then everything became a haze, names and faces dissolved into a grayish light, a shroud of sleep and forgetfulness.

  What the hell was this place?

  He walked on trying to understand and remember. A house – a large, empty house – with nobody living in it, its halls full of carpets and old drop-lamps exuding a hazy, murky, pestilent light; the walls plastered with old, damp, rotting paper with baroque patterns, dirty blue on a beige background, etched with alien, narcotic patterns, and in the air there as this stale, closed, sick smell. Hall after hall but no windows, no way out.

  Countless twists and hallways later, he came to a wooden door with a colored glass panel. He could just see a vague shape beyond that opaque glass. A presence.

  Nicola. His name was Nicola. Yes, Nicola was his name, and he worked for the waterworks. They were meant to do some maintenance along the Martesana waterway along the cycling path close to a Rom encampment, where a few isolated houses had sprouted up like weird mushrooms amidst neglected, yet luxurious greenery invaded by Milan’s July mosquitoes. There were four of them – that much he could remember. The rest had been swallowed up in a vortex of unreality.

  He opened the door and on the other side he found a room, a small room thickly furnished with antiques: dark wooden wardrobes and highboys, a different kind of wallpaper even more morbid and hypnotic with its labyrinthine twists and turns, and a round table covered with a white lace cloth. From the ceiling hung a drop-lamp larger than the others. Once again, no doors or windows on the outside, no way out.

  Sitting at the table, facing the door Nicola had come through, was an old lady knitting away with needle and thimble, both held masterfully in her tiny wrinkled hands. Her deftness was mechanical and nerve-wrecking as she sat there bent over her ball of pretty emerald yarn. She ignored him – in fact, she didn’t seem to notice him. She hunched over, working intently, her white hair done up in a fine bun, her body small and frail and dressed in a brown woolen robe.

  Nicola took a few steps forward and swallowed – his throat was burning up. “Excuse me, madam…”

  The old lady looked up. Her feeble, perspiring face glistened like a wax mask. Her eager blue eyes had thick dark bags
underneath. The skin on her cheekbones fell in heavy arches like the skin on the face of certain lurchers. She had an earthy olive complexion. Her familiar, unctuous expression was reminiscent of a cherished old aunty you hadn’t met in ages.

  “Poor dear, are you lost?” she asked with a buttery voice as she paused her knitting. She smiled sweetly.

  “I… I don’t think I feel too good, and…”

  “Have a seat then – have a seat! You’re tired and perspiring… I’ll be right back.” she said as she got up slowly, moving aside her wooden chair, laying on the table the unfinished sweater with her needle and thimble.

  Almost overcome by some hypnotic command, Nicola drew up the chair (but he didn’t remember seeing it when he came into the room) and sat down. He leaned against the table, exhausted, his arms crossed, his head resting on them. Just a few seconds.

  Just (don’t trust the old lady)

  a few seconds’ rest.

  He was so tired.

  Details were coming back to him now but in flashes – grey flashes. The Rom encampment to the right, a sudden Polaroid in his memory. The still, dark green waters of the Martesana, to the left. Tall vegetation all around and in the background the chimneys of old factories, and a large, dark-grey mushroom-shaped tower – perhaps an old watertank. He and three other men, each wearing an Elite Maintenance vest, were walking through the high bushes, complaining about the heat, the thorns, the mosquitoes. Five o’clock on a scorching and murky August afternoon. A Polaroid of a dilapidated house, hardly visible on the horizon, behind a field of unharvested rotten corn. A piercing whistle ripped through the ice-blue sky.

  Nicola opened his eyes and looked up. The old lady, smiling, had walked up to a stove with a kettle boiling on it. The plastic whistle (it sounds like a cock, not just any old bird, listen carefully, you waning wanker, you human waste, you bottom feeder, it’s a cock, Jesus) was emitting that obtuse hiss. Nicola realized that when he entered the room there was no stove, no kettle boiling. But there they were now, yes, and tea was ready.

  “I’ve made you some nice strong black tea – it’ll perk you up!” The old lady’s shadow sprawled out contortedly.

  “But where are we? I can’t… I can’t really remember, and…”

  The old lady laughed, shrugging slowly. She turned sideways to look at him. “Don’t bother yourself about it- It’s the heat, this terrible heat – it’s scrambling your brains. You’re in my home – Villa Bartoli.”

  “We’re from Elite Maintenance,” said Nicola slowly, more to himself that to his host. “We were just meant to fix the main… well, something.”

  “Of course, my dear,” said the old lady as she brought a black enamel tray with a teapot, two teacups and a plate of cookies to the table. “You went to the greenhouse – that’s where the pipes are but it’s even hotter there – I did tell you to take a break. This house is very large and (may Hell regurgitate you, you bastard sodomite) old; my husband Alfonso designed it – he was an eccentric architect, may God bless him, and it’s quite easy to get lost amidst.”

  “What?” said Nicola, bringing a hand to his forehead. He felt feverish – that fiery fever from before that cooked his senses.

  “I said if you wanted to try one of these butter cookies – I made them myself in my wood oven,” she said, handing him a cookie.

  Nicola took it and started to chew. The taste multiplied a thousandfold. A sweet, toffee-like taste; the dough was chewy and melted in his mouth.

  But there was that sheet of paper in his pocket – the sheet with those words on it. He was starting to remember now and his throat burned so much it hurt.

  “Drink up, have some tea – it’s black tea and it will make you feel better,” said the old lady, as if she had read his mind. She got back to her knitting, smiling all the time, and lifted her long metal needle, studying its tip.

  Nicola seized the china cup. His hands were shaking. The old lady stood again and walked up holding her long knitting needle. “Drink up, drink up.”

  Nicola took a deep breath and brought the cup to his lips. The hot steam filled his nose – an intense, sweet fragrance of blossoms.

  Polaroid: the four of them walking up to the porch of that very house – a house that seemed to have been abandoned for years, its windows barred shut, the grass unkempt, the sun choking everything in a metal vice. In the terse heat, a dog barked from far away, – a suffused, rhythmic bark, as if he were in the midst of a dream. Around them, a desert of rotten, dark yellow wheat. The world seemed to end there.

  Nicola’s lips touched the cup and he sipped the tea. It was delicious. He’d never tasted anything as good. The old lady stroked her knitting needle. “Do you feel better now?” she inquired.

  Nicola put the cup back down on the table. “I’m such a fool, Madam. The heat just got went to my head. I must’ve wandered about looking for the bathroom and then sss ss sss…”

  His throat snapped shut like a trap. Fiery fangs gouged at his carotid and vomit burst up his throat, a morbid mix of stomach acid and blood, a purplish slop erupting from his nose and mouth as he shot up and staggered back. Tears welled in his eyes. He gasped and flapped his hands blindly, grasping at the lace tablecloth, pulling it and upsetting everything – the teapot, the cups and the cookies. Twitching convulsively, he saw the old lady smile and come toward him, her arms spread open, as if to embrace him. Her face was sick greasepaint, a hybrid accumulation of maliciousness and distorted craving, her torso tapering sickly into a toothless mouth that clicked and clicked like castanets.

  Nicola backed toward the door and it opened behind him. He collapsed in the hallway and a gust of rancid stench covered the taste of blood and vomit in his mouth; it was the old lady croaking and clawing at his vest. Nicola was quick enough to wriggle his arm free and get out of the room, and he slammed the door shut. The old lady was imprisoned again in her room, and the door remained shut.

  Nicola crawled along the carpet and felt a second stomach spasm more violent than the first. The tea was tainted. He knew he was done for – he realized it with the last flickers of consciousness leaving him. There were the others. The other guys on the team. He had to resist for them. He had to resist a few more seconds.

  He took his sheet of paper from his pocket and unfolded it, staining it with his blood. He took his pen from his coat pocket – the pen with “Elite Maintenance” etched onto it – and, as he lay in a heap on the crimson carpet winding through the endless maze of hallways defaced by dead ends, dusty mirrors, stairs to nowhere, that abandoned and endless house that corrupted reality, its architectural entrails rent by inhuman pangs, he wrote something, and as he wrote, behind him, beyond the ground glass of the white wood door, a shadow moved, a small diaphanous shadow.

  There were two left. Lying in the greenhouse, wearing their Elite overalls, in opposite corners, every now and then they glanced at each other but didn’t have the nerve to utter a word. They had clearly heard the choked sobs and wheezes of Nicola. He hadn’t made it. And now there were two left.

  The short one knew his name was Marco. That much he could remember. They had come here with a task and, from the papers strewn on the floor, he could see it had something to do with the pipe works. Of course – the greenhouse. The human rampart in this nightmarish hell. The stop-over, the last refuge. Things here worked more or less normally – time and space were not the demented distortions of some obscure power reigning over the abandoned mansion. Here, everything was still and there was no smell of mold – two important factors. But the third… well, the third was that the old lady couldn’t get in here.

  That wasn’t all. The normality of this niche – a four-by-six-meter patio some grotesque sense of humor had dubbed a “greenhouse” – a vertical concrete duct, scorching under the perpendicular sun up there, and ornate with creepers like huge macrophages chewing on their grey guest, this normality was represented also by the regular functioning of the memory. Marco remembered. In gusts, with wrenched tho
ughts like a rag drenched in black scum, but something was there, for God’s sake. Something was there. But out there, outside the greenhouse, passing through one of the two wooden doors, you went back into the house, into that perverse, multiform maze of halls and dead ends and secret rooms and barred doors and impossibly high windows, closed off by rusty steel lattices, and that – that was the old lady’s realm.

  He could remember the cycle path filling up with cyclists when they came in, along the road, beyond the weeds. That was the last vision in Marco’s mind. The cyclists with their glitzy outfits and their reptilian helmets, catching sight of them as they arrived on the house’s porch. Then it all became confused – a phosphoric fog possessed his mind. Dark, heavy hallways, with scarlet carpets, arabesqued wallpaper with dizzying patterns, small windows like portholes, closed off by intertwining lattices, and the old lady coming to the door to welcome them in – the old lady. Smiling, genial, petite. She led them to those roomless hallways and there something changed, something inside them broke. The four men looked at each other dumbfounded, astounded, unable to recognize each other, or even recall what they were doing there. The only reason they hadn’t questioned anything had been the old lady’s calm, persuasive voice – a chirping voice that calmed them, cajoled them, but concealed under its warm modulation an age-old secret, an invisible mask, beneath that nice-old-lady voice Marco could distinctly remember a different plane of reality, a deviated din, a miasma of raucous, underground voices.

  She had led them into a room – the only one that seemed to make any sense, with a hint of normality (but the bodies of dead children hide and crawl behind that arabesqued wallpaper, you polymorph bastard, the bodies of dead children are oozing out of that wallpaper), she’d had them sit around her knitting table, she had served them cookies, buttery greasy cookies (guess what they’re made of, you sick dog, think beyond the wallpaper), she had made some black tea and, while they looked at each other, without saying a word, like freshly reanimated corpses, like overdosed opium junkies, their eyes languid, glimmering, begging for mutual help but unable to do anything but mechanically reach out for a cookie, bring it to their mouths, chew on a morsel, swallow slowly, and then start begging again; well, the old lady came back to them, she approached Mastorna, the foreman, and emptied on his head the entire content of the teapot – a liter of boiling black jasmine tea.