Caterpillars by E. F. Benson. I saw a month or two ago
in an Italian paper that the Villa Cascana in which I once stayed had been
pulled down, and that a manufactory of some sort was in process of erection
at sight. There is therefore no longer any reason for refraining from writing of
those things which I myself saw or imagined I saw in a certain room and
on a certain landing of the villa in question, nor from mentioning the circumstances
which followed, which may or may not, according to the opinion of the
reader, throw some light on or be somehow connected with this experience. The
Villa Cascana was, in all ways but one a perfectly delightful house. Yet
if it were standing now, nothing in the world I used a phrase in
its literal sense would induce me to set footet at again, for I believe
it to have been haunted in a very terrible and practical manner. Most ghosts,
when all is said and done, do not do much harm. They
may perhaps terrify, but the person whom they visit usually gets over their visitation.
They may, on the other hand, be entirely friendly and beneficent,
but the appearances in the Villa Cascana were not beneficent, and had they made
their visit in a very slightly different manner, I do not suppose I should
have got over it anymore than Arthur Inglis did. The house stood on an
islex clad hill, not far from Thencestry de Lavante, on the Italian Riviera,
looking out over the iridescent blues of that enchanted sea, while behind it
rose the pale green chestnut woods that climb up the hillsides till they give place
to the pines that black, in contrast with them, crown the slopes all
round. At the garden in the luxuriance of mid spring, bloomed and was
fragrant, and the scent of magnolia and rose borne on the salt freshness of
the winds from the sea flowed like a stream through the cool vaulted rooms.
On the ground floor, a broad pillared loggia ran round three sides of the
house, the top of which formed a balcony for certain rooms of the first
floor. The main staircase, broad and of gray marble, steps, led
up from the hall to the landing. Outside these rooms, which were three
in number, namely two big sitting rooms and a bedroom arranged on suite.
The ladder was unoccupied, the sitting rooms were in use. From these the
main staircase was continued to the second floor, where were situated certain bedrooms,
one of which I occupied, while from the other side of the first floor
landing, some half dozen steps led to another suite of rooms, where,
at the time I am speaking of Arthur Inglis, the artist had his bedroom
in studio. Thus the landing outside my bedroom at the top of the house
commanded both the landing of the first floor and also the steps that led to
England room Jim Stanley and his wife. Finally, whose guest I was occupied
rooms in another wing of the house, where also were the servants quarters.
I arrived just in time for lunch on a brilliant noon of mid May.
The garden was shouting with color and fragrance, and not less delightful after my
broiling walk up from the marina should have been the coming from the reverberating heat
and blaze of the day into the marble coolness of the villa. Only the
reader has my bare word for this and nothing more. The moment I set
foot into the house, I felt that something was wrong. This feeling,
I may say, was quite vague, though very strong. And I remember
that when I saw letters waiting for me on the table in the hall,
I felt certain that the explanation was here. I was convinced that there was
bad news of some sort for me. Yet when I opened them, I
found no such explanation of my premonition. My correspondence all reeked of prosperity.
Yet this clear miscarriage of a presentiment did not dissipate my uneasiness in that cool,
fragrant house. There was something wrong. I am at pains to mention
this, because to the general view, it may explain that, though I
am as a rule so excellent asleep, or that the extinction of my light
on getting into bed is apparently contemporaneous with being called on the following morning,
I slept very badly on my first night at the Villicuskana. It may also
explain the fact that when I did sleep, if it was indeed in sleep
that I saw what I thought I saw, I dreamed in a very vivid
and original manner. Original, that is to say, in the sense that
something that, as far as I knew, had never previously entered into my
consciousness. Usurped it then. But since in addition to this evil premonition,
certain words and events occurring during the rest of the day might have suggested something
of what I thought happened that night, it will be well to relate them
after lunch. Then I went round the house with Missus Stanley, and during
our tour she referred, it is true to the unoccupied bedroom on the first
floor, which opened out of the room where we had lunched. We left
that unoccupied, she said, because Jim and I have a charming bedroom and
dressing room, as you saw in the wing, and if we used it
ourselves, we should have to turn the dining room into a dressing room and
have our meals downstairs. As it is, however, we have our little
flat there. Arthur Inglis has his little flat in the other passage. And
I remembered, arty extraordinary that you once said that the higher up you were
in a house, the better you were pleased. So I put you at
the top of the house instead of giving you that room. It is true
that a doubt, vague as my uneasy premonition, crossed my mind at this
I did not see why Missus Stanley should have explained all this if there had
been not been more to explain, I allow therefore that the thought that there
was something to explain about the unoccupied bedroom was momentarily present to my mind.
The second thing that may have borne on my dream was this. At dinner,
the conversation turned for a moment on ghosts. English, with the certainty
of conviction, expressed his belief that anybody who could possibly believe in the existence
of supernatural phenomena was unworthy of the name of an ass. The subject instantly
dropped. As far as I can recollect, nothing else occurred or was said
that could bear on what follows. We all went to bed rather early,
and personally I yawned my way upstairs, feeling hideously sleepy. My room was
rather hot, and I threw all the windows wide, and from without poured
in the white light of the moon and the love song of many nightingales.
I undressed quickly and got into bed. But though I had felt so sleepy
before, I now felt extremely wide awake. But I was quite content to
be awake. I did not toss or turn. I felt perfectly happy listening
to the song and seeing the light. Then it is possible I may have
gone to sleep, and what follows may have been a dream. I thought,
anyhow, that after a time, the nightingales ceased singing, and the
moon sank. I thought also that if for some unexplained reason, I was
going to lie awake all night, I might as well read. And I
remembered that I had left a book in which I was interested in the dining
room on the first floor. So I got out of bed, lit a
candle, and went downstairs. I went into the room, saw on a
side table the book I had come to look for, and then simultaneously saw
that the door into the unoccupied bedroom was open. A curious gray light,
not of dawn nor of moonshine, came out of it, and I looked
in the bed stood just opposite the door, a big four poster hung with
tapestry at the head. Then I saw that the grayish light of the bedroom
came from the bed, or rather what was on the bed, for it
was covered with great caterpillars a foot or more in length, which crawled over
it. They were faintly luminous, and it was the light from them that
showed me the room. Instead of the sucker feet of ordinary caterpillars. They
had rows of pincers like crabs, and they moved by grasping what they lay
on with their pincers and then sliding their bodies forward. In color, these
dreadful insects were yellowish gray, and they were covered with irregular lumps and swellings.
There must have been hundreds of them, for they formed a sort of
writhing, crawling pyramid on the bed. Occasionally one fell off onto the floor
with a soft, fleshy thud, and though the floor was of hard concrete,
it yielded to the pincer feet as if it had been putty, and
crawling back, the caterpillar would mount onto the bed again to rejoin its fearful
companions. They appeared to have no faces, so to speak, but at
one of them there was a mouth that opened sideways and respiration. Then as
I looked, it seemed to me that they all suddenly became conscious of my
presence. All the mouths, at any rate, were turned in my direction,
and next moment they began dropping off the bed with those soft fleshy thuds
onto the floor and wriggling towards me. For a second a paralysis as of
a dream was on me. But the next I was running upstairs again to
my room, and I remember feeling the cold of the marble steps on my
bare feet. I rushed into my bedroom and slammed the door behind me,
and then I was certainly wide awake. Now I found myself standing by my
bed, with a sweat of terror pouring from me. The noise of the
bang door still rang in my ears. But as would have been more usual
if this had been mere nightmare, the terror that had been mine when I
saw those foul beasts crawling about the bed or dropping softly onto the floor,
did not cease then awake. Now, if dream before I did not at
all recover from the horror of dream, it did not seem to me that
I had dreamed. And until dawn I sat or stood, not daring to
lie down, thinking that every rustle or movement that I heard was the approach
of the caterpillars to them, and the clawse that bit into the cement the
wood of the door was child's play. Steele would not keep them out.
But with the sweet and noble return of day, the horror vanished. The
whisper of wind became benignant again. The nameless fear, whatever it was,
was smoothed out and terrified me no longer. Dawn broke hewless at first,
then it grew dove colored. Then the flaming pageant of light spread over the
sky. The admirable rule of the house was that everybody had breakfast where and
when he pleased, And in consequence, it was not till lunch time that
I met any of the other members of our party, since I had breakfast
on my balcony and wrote letters and other things till lunch. In fact,
I got down to that meal rather late, after the other three had begun.
Between my knife and fork there was a small pill box of cardboard,
and as I sat down, English spoke, Do look at that? He
said, since you are interested in natural history. I found it crawling on
my counterpane last night, and I don't know what it is. I think
that before I opened the pill box I expected something of the sort which I
found in it. Inside, anyhow, was a small caterpillar, grayish yellow
in color, with curious bumps, and it crescences on its rings. It
was extremely active and hurried round the box this way, and that its feet
were unlike the feet of any caterpillar I ever saw. They were like the
pincers of a crab. I looked and shut the lid down again. No,
I don't know it, I said, but it looks rather unwholesome.
What are you going to do with it? Oh, I shall keep it,
said English. It has begun the spin. I want to see what
sort of a walth it turns into. I opened the box again and saw
that these hurrying movements were indeed the beginning of the spinning of the web of
its cocoon. Then English spoke again. It has got funny feet too,
he said, They are like crabs pincers. What's the Latin for crab?
Oh? Yes, cancer, So in case it is unique, let's christen
it cancer English census. Then something happened in my brain, some momentary piecing
together of all that I had seen or dreamed. Something in his words seemed
to me to throw light on it all, and my own intense horror at
the experience of the night before linked itself onto what he had just said.
In effect, I took the box and threw it caterpillar and all out of
the window. There was a gravel path just outside, and beyond it a
fountain playing into a basin. The box fell onto the middle of this,
English laughed. So the students of the occult don't like solid facts, he
said, my poor caterpillar. The talk went off again at once, on
to other subjects. And I have only given in detail as it happened,
these trivialities, in order to be sure myself that I have recorded everything that
could have borne on occult subjects, or on the subject of caterpillars. But
at the moment when I threw the pill box into the fountain, I lost
my head. My own excuses that, as is probably plain, the tenant
of it was in miniature exactly what I had seen crowded onto the bed in
the unoccupied room. And though this translation of those phantoms into flesh and blood
or whatever it is that caterpillars are made of, ought perhaps to have relieved
the horror of the night, as a matter of fact, it did nothing
of the kind. It only made the crawling pyramid that covered the bed in
the unoccupied room more hideously real. After lunch we spent a lazy hour to
strolling about the garden or sitting in the loggia. And it must have been
about four o'clock when Stanley and I started off the bathe down the path that
led by the fountain into which I had thrown the pillbox. The water was
shallow and clear, and at the bottom of it I saw its white remains.
The water had disintegrated the cardboard, and it had become no more than
a few strips and shreds of sod and paper. The center of the fountain
was a marble Italian cupid, which squirted the water out of a wine skin
held under its arm, and crawling up its leg. Was the caterpillar,
strange and scarcely credible, as it seemed, it must have survived the falling
to bits of its prison and made its way to shore. And there was
out of arm's reach, weaving and waving this way and that as it evolved
its cocoon. Then as I looked at it, it seemed to me again
that like the caterpillar I had seen last night, it saw me, and,
breaking out of the threads that surrounded it, it crawled down the marble
leg of the cupid and began swimming like a snake across the water of the
fountain towards me. It came with extraordinary speed. The fact of a caterpillar
being able to swim was new to me, and in another moment was crawling
up the marble lip of the basin. Just then English joined us, wh
it is an old cancer ingleciensis. Again, he said, catching sight of
the beast, What a tearing hurry it is in We were standing side by
side on the path, and when the caterpillar had advanced to within about a
yard of us, it stopped and began waving again, as if in doubt
as to the direction in which it should go. Then it appeared to make
up its mind and crawled onto English's shoe. It likes me best, he
said, But I don't really know that I like it. And as it
won't drowned, I think perhaps he shook it off his shoe onto the gravel
path and trod on it all afternoon the air got heavier and heavier, with
a sirocco that was, without doubt coming up from the south. And that
night again I went up to bed feeling very sleepy, but below my drowsiness,
so to speak, there was the consciousness stronger than before, that there
was something wrong in the house, that something dangerous was close at hand.
But I fell asleep at once, and how long or I do not know
either woke or dreamed. I awoke, feeling that I must get up at
once, or I should be too late. Then dreaming or awake, I
lay and fought this fear, telling myself that I was but the prey of
my own nerves, disordered by sirocco or whatnot, and at the same time,
quite clearly knowing in another part of my mind, so to speak,
that every moment's delay added to the danger. At last, this second feeling
became irresistible, and I put on coat and trousers and went out of my
room onto the landing. And then I saw that I had already delayed too
long, and that I was now too late. The whole of the landing
of the first floor below was invisible under the swarm of caterpillars that crawled there.
The folding doors into the sitting room from which opened the bedroom where I
had seen them last night, were shut, but they were squeezing through the
cracks of it, and dropping one by one through the keyhole, elongating themselves
into mere string as they passed, and growing fat and lumpy again. On
emerging, some as if exploring, were nosing about the steps into the passage
at the end of which were English's rooms. Others were crawling on the lowest
steps of the staircase that led up to where I stood. The landing,
however, was completely covered with them. I was cut off and of the
frozen horror that seized me when I saw that I can give no idea in
words. Then at last a general movement began to take place, and they
grew thicker on the steps that led to English's room. Gradually, like some
hideous tide of flesh, they advanced along the passage, and I saw,
the foremost visible by the pale, gray luminousness that came from them, reach
his door again and again. I tried to shout and warn him, and
terror all the time that they would turn at the sound of my voice and
mount my stair instead. But for all my efforts, I felt that no
sound came from my throat. They crawled along the hinge crack of his door,
passing through as they had done before, and still I stood there,
making impotent efforts to shout to him, to bid him escape while there was
time. At last a passage was completely empty. They had all gone,
and at that moment I was conscious for the first time of the cold of
the marble landing on which I stood barefooted. The dawn was just beginning to
break in the eastern sky. Six months after I met missus Stanley in a
country house in England. We talked to many subjects, and at last she
said, I don't think i've seen you since I got that dreadful news about
Arthur English a month ago. I haven't heard, said I. No,
he's got cancer. They don't even advise an operation, for there is no
hope of a cure. He has riddled with it, the doctors say.
Now, during all these six months, I do not think a day had
passed on which I had not had in my mind the dreams or whatever you
like to call them, which I had seen in the villa Quskana. It
is awful, is it not? She continued, And I feel I can't
help feeling that he may have caught it at the villa, I asked.
She looked at me in blank surprise. Why did you say that? She
asked? How did you know? Then? She told me in the unoccupied
bedroom, a year before there had been a fatal case of cancer. She
had, of course taken the best advice and been told that the utmost dictates
of prudence would be obeyed as long as she did not put anybody to sleep
in the room, which had also been thoroughly disinfected and newly whitewashed and painted.
But end of caterpillars