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Vestavia Hills
Christian Perego
Robert Red is an aspiring writer. Cynical and disillusioned with life, he lives in Vestavia Hills, a small town in Alabama. Robert is writing the novel that will consecrate him to fame and we can imagine his shock when leafing through the novel of an unknown author, Imogen Fry, he discovers that the pages are identical to his. However, at the same time, what role has the character of the Protestant pastor Johnathan Abblepot, who lived 150 years before in Vestavia Hills? And Elisabeth, his wife? And won't the mystery that unfolds in the town and in the woods that surround it be too much for the young detective Abbot? Perhaps, in one way or another, only Imogen Fry will be able to provide an answer.
Christian Perego
VESTAVIA HILLS
Tradotto da
Annalisa Gugliotta
Pubblicato da Tektime
Copyright © 2020 - Christian Perego
VESTAVIA HILLS
I would like to make you understand who Johnathan Abblepot is, but I don't know where to start.
There are too many things to say about him. Too many to understand. Maybe you don't like mysteries, maybe you are a guy who loves to see things in the light of the sun, to define their outlines, because this way you always know what to do. Well, you'd be better stripping off of your certainties, because sometimes it doesn't happen the way you think.
It's Sunday morning, look around. Can you see the town waking up? Can you see the people who start leaving the house to go to Mass, dressed as best they can, without overdoing it. Do you see them?
There is nothing special about Vestavia Hills, it is a town like any other. Nothing more, nothing less.
If you look up, the colour of lead makes it clear that even this day could be similar to a thousand others that people here have already seen. A red streak, however unnatural, marks the sky; it's almost like a tear of blood, almost a wound that hurts. You can almost hear the thunder in the distance, even if this time they have gravity, a sound that makes you uncomfortable. Who knows what it is?
Look at the first small family who is not far from you. They too are heading towards the church. The man wears a distinct black suit, a little creased. The wife is half a step behind him, she wears a wide skirt with folds, which does not make it clear if her legs are slender and toned or worn out by time; the woman is still quite young, she seems pretty. She holds a child by the hand, his hair combed neatly and with long socks on; he looks like the son worthy of his parents.
All three, now, turn to look at you, and you realize that the deepening of their eyes frightens you: in those dark orbits, you cannot distinguish a trace of feelings; no curiosity, no irreverence, much less cordiality. It is difficult even to recognize the eyes, because they look like small dark caves.
"Emma! Don't stare at people!" says the man, also shaking you off from that vision, which now it finally turns into a natural scene.
"Sorry, dear, I don't know what got into me," replies his wife, who has finally returned to being a person with eyes.
Then the woman adds to her son: "Joshua, don't stare at people, he's not polite."
The child still lingers a moment to look at her, but thank God now he too has nothing strange.
What's wrong with you?
Maybe you slept poorly.
Last night too?
It happens to you now and then.
Rub your eyes, look away, and try to regain a demeanor.
The red wound in the clouds has not yet disappeared.
The air gets heavy. You can breathe well, without gasping, but you realize that something is wrong; it feels like breathing in metal, metal with a little rust. The breath almost becomes flavored in the mouth; it is disgusting.
As you approach the church, the number of people on the street increases. Now it is as if no one can see you. Even your mere bodily presence does not seem evident. You are an impalpable being in a crowd that appears made up of ghosts. They are like machines that walk without consistency. The women, with their long skirts down to the ground, seem to float.
Here is the church.
The building is beautiful: it would convey ease and a sense of peace, on a day different from this.
Now it's overwhelming.
No, maybe it's not overwhelming, because it attracts you.
It is undoubtedly an attraction that you feel, partly because of the crowd now even more numerous, partly because of an irrational curiosity, which tells you that something will happen there.
The church certainly attracts you, but it also intimidates you, like when your father lifted his shirt to start pulling the belt out of his pants. It is subtle anxiety at the beginning because you always hope that something painful will not happen. Still, then, slowly, the concern grows, until it becomes terror, the terror of certainty.
A rumbling, almost like a thousand hornets, comes from inside the building.
Now you would like to know who I am.
Before entering, you need to know, you think.
Nothing will change for you.
I'm not the one who brought it here; you don't need a name to blame for what you're doing.
Maybe you slept poorly last night too, I repeat it. And that's why you are cranky.
Reverend Johnathan Abblepot is almost about to start the function. You'd better hurry.
Inside the church, everyone is seated graciously. It is an army of pious people, who will move in unison at the mere nod of their reverend. Slaughter souls blissfully waiting to be dissected and condemned by a few words.
Take a seat. It is not convenient to stand; here on the left.
You wanted to know who Johnathan Abblepot is, right?
How can I explain it to you? It is not easy to explain something to those who think they already know, to those who probably, deep down, already know.
Johnathan Abblepot is a name that someone knew well, a name that lost its consistency when that man was gone, to gain something else more... unique.
Johnathan Abblepot is the man who is about to speak now from the pulpit.
Johnathan Abblepot is the one who stands before you right now.
Reverend Abblepot observes the crowd in front of him with a look of anger and inhumanity that makes you shiver.
Behind him, something starts to bleed. Almost everyone in the church begins to bleed out. Now Johnathan Abblepot's eyes are as red as blood.
The sound of hornets becomes so loud that it prevents you from hearing the words that man is saying.
However, now you realize that the priest is not speaking.
His mouth opened in a silent cry, a cry that even if you cannot hear, it is still frightening to see. His mouth opens wide with an unnatural movement and becomes more open and broader than any human mouth.
Lightning strikes inside the church.
Then a scream of pain, which is not in the air, but breaks out inside of you.
Johnathan Abblepot continues in his chilling cry with his frighteningly wide-open mouth.
I.F.
THE STRANGE AFTERNOON OF ROBERT RED
1.
Vestavia Hills, 2008
Robert Red woke up startled. He gasped, panted, and sat on the bed. The naked torso beaded with sweat; the back completely damp; hair attached to the forehead.
He could not calm down completely and still had his eyes wide open.
He shivered with chills at the thought of the deformed face of the man on the pulpit, the undisputed protagonist of his last nightmares;
in the world he knew, there was nothing more terrifying than those eyes, and that scream.
This time Robert was further disturbed by the voice that guided him into that hallucinated world, expecting to give him orders and commenting on everything he thought or felt.
In some of the bad dreams tormenting him for some time now, he had already perceived a baritone and slightly silent voice that murmured something; but he had never heard the words as clearly as in this last nightmare.
It sounded like the off-screen voice of a horror film. In which all the horror that happened aimed at swallowing him up, Robert.
After slowly making a reason that he was in his room and not in a hellish church, and having become aware that he had not participated in any ritual officiated by a kind of demon with a cassock, he got up.
The contact of the bare feet on the cold floor always helped to relieve him, awakening him completely and ensuring solid touch with reality.
Robert glared at the sleep pills that the doctor had prescribed for him: "Fuck the pills and the damn doctor."
He had approached him almost immediately after having his first nightmares.
Robert Red was an apprehensive type who immediately became agitated by a problem and became nervous if he didn't find a solution just as quickly.
The doctor had ruled that there was nothing to worry about having a little restless sleep.
"People nowadays live, or decide to live, in a state of permanent stress. If we take into account some worries related to your job, it is not strange, Robert, that you sleep badly," so he had ruled. After that, he had prescribed the pills.
Not that at the beginning, they didn't work. But within a few weeks, not even the double dosage that Robert had ordered himself had banished the night's anxieties.
The young man had persevered with the therapy. But now, the time had come to convince himself that it was not adequate, and to curse pills and the doctor.
Robert went to the bathroom and looked sadly in the mirror at his face, which had a swollen and half-destroyed look; it could not even appear angry, so overwhelmed with tiredness as it was.
Might as well get ready to start the day, perhaps with a walk. The city wasn't too bad in the early morning.
Robert Red took a shower, with a final rinse almost frozen to activate the mind and muscles. He shaved. Then he went to the small kitchen of his two-room rented apartment. He slowly chewed some toast and sparingly drank black and unsweetened coffee from a large cup, then sat on the sofa for a few minutes.
"If you go on at this rate, old friend, you will become a plain and simple, lunatic," Robert said to himself, smiling through gritted teeth at what he had just predicted.
Robert Red was not about to turn into a lunatic, even if, even before the problems of insomnia affected him, this sentence had been given to him twice.
The first one was a very drunk girl, with whom he had tried to flirt at a party. Therefore, there wasn't much to pay attention about. The second time had been much more painful, because it came from his ex, Jenny, and established the definitive break between the two of them.
"This chick looks a little like Jenny," thought Robert in front of the image of a seller of cosmetic products on the TV he had just turned on.
Then he looked at a book he had on the table: a rather mediocre novel, by an author who was branded by many as equally mediocre, but that he had wanted to buy anyway, to have something undemanding to distract himself with.
It was a hard-boiled story, but without the inventiveness and ease of writing that characterized the best of its kind. It was the story of a girl suspected of killing her first husband, she then remarried with the "typical" old man full of money, and avoid generating other suspicions of having murdered that one too for the common inheritance issue. But then: did the girl's friend know she had a lover or hadn't told her yet up until the chapter he read?
He couldn't remember.
But why puzzle over that nonsense? Ideas of a scribbler lacking ambition.
He took the book and flicked through a few pages; he went to the more crumpled ones, which he had read several times, because, even if lacking an exciting plot and characters, some phrases, some atmospheres had not seemed so wrong to him. Maybe they could give him some ideas.
Yes, because Robert Red was a writer. He wanted to be. He aimed to be one of those who fund a bank account with several zeros thanks to their talent as storytellers.
He wasn't too bad as a storyteller.
Or so he thought. However, his self-esteem improved thanks to some friends who encouraged him, and by a sort of literary critic's opinion, someone who his cousin Tod introduced him to, and who had decently evaluated his first job.
At that time, Robert had a career without shame nor praise, in the office of a medium-small company in Vestavia Hills, so he was drawn to that dream.
He spent an entire summer and even part of the fall of 2006 to find a publisher for his novel.
In short, it had not been what you call an easy task, but in the end, he had made it.
Then, making a little effort on himself and his pride and, following the advice of his then editor, he had corrected and rewritten some parts and, something decent had come out of his pages managed to sell some copies.
According to him, not bad, as a start.
In short, he had become a writer, he thought and had decided that was what he wanted to do.
To hell with family advice and the myth of a steady job that guarantees you a living.
Sure! That guarantees you a life that is always the same, a filthy apartment in an anonymous area of the center, and a series of days as nobody; opinion that you ended up thinking about yourself too.
It was not a guaranteed career that of a novelist, but Robert felt he wanted to try it with more energy than just a hobby.
