Speaker 1: 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 foot in it 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 any more than Arthur Inglis did. The house
stood on an alex clad hill, not far from the
Sestri di Levante 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,
broadened 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 latter 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 and 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
in 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 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
a sleep, 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 Villa Cascana. 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 our
Tyke 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. Anglis, 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 from 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 banged 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 dreamed 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 claws that bit into the cement.
The wood of the door was child's play. Steel 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 increscences 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 Inglis. It has begun to spin.
I want to see what sort of a mooth 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 senses. Then something happened to 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 in fact, 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 onto other subjects.
And I have only given in detail as they happen,
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 only excuse is 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 two 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 pill box. 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 it 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, why if 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 drown, 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 after 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 sphere, telling
myself that I was but the prey of my own nerves,
disordered by sirocco or what not, 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
on to 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 Inglis'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
Ingliss'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 in teror all the time that they would
turn at the sound of my voice and mount my
stare instead. But for all my efforts, I felt that
no sound came from my throat. They crawled along the
hingecrack 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 the 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 on
many subjects, and at last she said, I don't think
i've seen you since I got that dreadful news about
Arthur Ingliss 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 is 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 Kascana. 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 and of caterpillars.