19
YEARS PASSED. The war ended. Sicily, once so desired for its strategic value in the Mediterranean, was abandoned by the world’s powers, its significance largely forgotten. Most of the children were adopted by people from the village of Tringale, or claimed by distant relatives once the threat of war had passed. In time, the orphanage became merely a rectory once again. Of the orphans, only one remained. Soon enough there were two priests at the church of San Domenico, and then three, but Father Gaetano was not among them. He had departed even before the war’s end.
In Tringale, they still talked about the young priest. The children who had been adopted from the orphanage told stories—wild, incredible tales, equally horrid and absurd—and the story of Father Gaetano’s Puppet Catechism became a legend, of sorts. At least in Tringale.
Caretakers came and went. The church’s pastor would hire one, and not long after the man would quit the job. Some of them had the decency to apologize, but others simply left at the end of one work day and never returned. The more courteous among them would make a game attempt to muster up some explanation for their abrupt departures, but they needn’t have bothered. The priests, and the nuns at the convent, always knew it had been the basement that frightened them off.
The basement, and the furnace.
The fire that burned that December night left many scars behind, both on those who had been there to see it and on the floors and walls. The black scorching on the stone would remain for as long as the rectory stood. Everything that had been stored in the corner by the furnace had been charred to ruin, removed and carted away in the days after the blaze. None of the workers who took part ever volunteered their services to the church of San Domenico again. Several stopped going to mass altogether.
Father Gaetano installed a heavy deadbolt lock with three keys. The pastor had one, the convent’s mother superior the second, and the long succession of caretakers would hold the third. They were the only three who were allowed to descend into the basement unaccompanied. In time, the church had a new pastor who kept all three keys for himself. Rumors spread about him, and about the single, scorched puppet that sat on a shelf in his office. Once, so the whispers said, it had been a clown. It was also said that the pastor, Father Sebastiano, would not permit even the caretaker to go into the basement alone, especially when the weather turned cold.
In the winter, when the furnace crackled and hissed with fire, strange noises could be heard amidst the roar of flames. A sound like the screaming of the damned, one caretaker claimed, in a note he left behind when he fled his duties in the middle of the night.
As if Hell itself is close by, he wrote.
Just out of reach.