Malocchio

Story for the Top in Fiction 'Inanimate Object' Halloween Event

Oct 31, 2025

The man unloading the wagon brought the model inside on a tablet of fine polished beechwood and set it down. Alessandra looked at it. Again she asked herself: Can a house that has never even existed still be haunted?

She tipped the man as he finished unstacking boxes. Two soldi, a whole week’s living expenses, and her with nothing left in her purse but buttons and wishes. Grumbling at the paucity of his pay, the wagoneer withdrew.

She stacked all her father’s rolled-up architectural plans in one corner. These papers could be scoured clean and reused later for sketching. The model she placed on the wide oak table for dining and working. Looking down on it, she again resisted the urge to smash it to bits. The thought of her arm sweeping across the table, smashing the model to splinters against the wall, it was powerful. But this thing was now the only remnant of her father’s life, a small relic of a small failure which crowned a lifelong career of defeat and disappointment.

The model was meticulous, the work obsessive in its attention to the tiniest detail. Plasterwork friezes with carvings of gods and satyrs, features no bigger than a baby’s fingernail. A roof with ceramic tiles small as lizards’ scales that would lift off, allowing one to view the interior detail.

Alessandra knew her father’s vision wasn’t too good in the months before his passing. He would’ve had to use the jeweller’s magnifying glass over his good eye to fashion a work of such absurd intricacy. She’d found the eyepiece among his possessions, perhaps the most valuable of the many trinkets he’d left behind.

She looked down again on the carved columns and the harlequin black-and-white floortiles, feeling like a grotesque titaness from Greek mythology. Vertiginous waves of nausea swam over her as she towered over it. Dimensions and scales stretched and shrank. She was small as a flea then vast as a colossus. And again that desire to sweep an arm over this thing, to see it shatter in pieces...

She’d felt that same impulse when the ducal steward Signore D’Angelo conducted her into her father’s old workshop and had first shown the model to her. Just as it seemed that her father’s decades-long run of bad luck was over – a commission from the Duke Alfonso of Ferrara himself to build his new palazzo – just at this moment of triumph, architect Antonio delle Nuvole was found dead. No illness, no lingering agony; simply dead at fifty-three. Across the moat bridge into the old castle, through portals guarded by harlequin soldiers with glinting halberds, massive as headsmen’s axes. On the far side of the moat was the abandoned construction site of the Palazzo dei Diamanti, foundations barely visible in deep trenches, granite blocks and marble facings stacked uselessly beside scaffolding. New master builder Ludovico Rosetti was hard at work to craft a new design which might catch Duke Alfonso’s fancy.

Alessandra’s portrait of her father was also incomplete. In her painting, he stood uncertainly over half-sketched plans, plans now completed and stacked in her corner, now rendered utterly futile. She’d planned to retouch his hesitant expression to something displaying mastery and confidence. But now the portrait would remain forever poised in the interstice between thought and unconsummated deed. Who knows whether she would leave the portrait as it was, complete it from memory and forlorn nostalgia – or else scrape it clean again to make a blank canvas for a new work, something that would pay.

Nothing now remained of her father’s lifetime of struggle and humiliation. Only this bizarrely detailed model, incarnation of a lost piece of the world that would never now exist. A detached remnant of a lifetime’s wreckage. Only that thing, and herself, remained. Twin heirs to nothing at all.

Her own work went on, as it had to. She had a commission from the proctors of The Sacred Family Basilica to paint an altarpiece showing the Temptation of Saint Anthony. But they didn’t want a typical old man like in the celebrated painting by young Michelangelo. They wanted a strapping man in his prime. They believed it would better illustrate how bodily strength availed us naught when fighting off demons of temptation; only sincere faith in the Lord’s grace could achieve salvation. Or something.

Alessandra had just the man. Tomasso Diestro was an apprentice stablehand in the duke’s castle, able to slip out from time to time to ply a clandestine side trade as an artist’s model. Nobody knew where he went, and he told no-one of his shameful sideline.

Though uncultured, with an odor hinting at horses, to behold he was an Adonis. His square jaw haloed with youthful fuzz, his thick dark eyebrows and curled hair, the body in the perfect proportions of a classical statue. To her artist’s eye he could better become a hero-lover from the epics, an Aeneas perhaps, than some half-crazed anchorite priest tormented by demons. But in any case, given that Tomasso existed, it would be criminal not to paint him. In his monk’s robe, a toga she’d improvised from bedsheets, he was not so much a saint resisting temptation as he was by himself a corporeal temptation.

Alessandra took somewhat longer than necessary to arrange the folds of his robe, and her touches adjusting his pose lingered perhaps a tad more than required. Finally she straightened the gold-leafed halo on his curled head and set to work.

The day was unexpectedly warm, an advance in early June of Sirius’s dog days of late July. As she painted Tomasso’s body onto canvas, trying to make it glow with the same power it had in life, she felt the bristles somehow becoming her fingers. A vertigo overcame her, her vision blurring... and at once she smeared paint along the canvas, letting the brush fall to the floor.

‘Signorina Alessa?’ Tomasso snapped out of his pose to come to her. He took her in his arms and she found that she’d collapsed to the floor. His arms were supportive and gentle. But the strength in them. His stable smell, so earthen and inviting...

‘It’s nothing, thank you Tomassino.’ She felt embarrassed, a foolish schoolgirl swooning in summer heat. She allowed him to help her to her feet, but then gently began to push him away. Her hand hesitated, halting on the soft curling hair of his chest and the firmness beneath it.

She broke away, snatched up a rag and wiped the smear of paint from the picture. There: it was fine. No lasting stain remained. Tomasso walked over to the table where the model palace lay and poured a tumbler of fresh water from a pitcher. He was going to give the wooden vessel to her, but became distracted, staring at the model and sipping the water himself. After a short time he remembered what he was doing, and brought the tumbler over to her, though his eyes turned back again toward the model.

A moment passed. She with her attention on the painting, looking for any slips she may have made in her work, but with furtive glances at the stable hand. He with his attention on her, watching for signs of another faint, but with his eyes drawn time and again to the model on the table.

She set the wooden tumbler on the floor next to her easel. ‘Let’s get back to it, shall we?’ He nodded and resumed his place, but the air in her room had become close and humid, and she found it harder than ever to concentrate. Again she adjusted the folds of Tomasso’s robe and aligned his posture. Her touches lingered longer than before. That horse smell, hay and faint sweat. Her sight swam again, but this time she didn’t fall. Placing him the way he should stand. Touching where he should stand...

Outside her window the weather shifted. Thick raindrops began to fall and a low roll of distant thunder pushed over the still air of the town. Inside, something had shifted in Tomasso too. He no longer responded passively to Alessandra’s touch, but began to initiate touches of his own. His saintly halo slipped and fell onto the floor, and slowly she gathered herself within the folds of the hermit’s costume made of bedsheets.

Afterwards, sleeping in Tomasso’s arms as rain fell outside to soothe heavy air in dusty streets, she dreamed herself into her father’s tiny palazzo, that palace of the diamonds which would never now exist in this world. In the dream she was herself, naked, miniscule, smaller than a fly. On the harlequin tiles of the main hall she looked up and there was an elaborate chandelier with a thousand infinitesimal candles. The flames were smaller than fine pinpricks in velvet, yet also bigger than suns. Dimensions stretched and snapped: material things like walls and windows, immaterial things like light and touch and smell, smaller one instant than the mind could grasp, then vast as chasms.

Tiny Alessandra inched her way into the hall, seeing dryads and satyrs on the plasterwork friezes above the doorways. She began to dream murals showing Grecian heroes rutting with forest nymphs, centaurs mounting swans who were virgin girls, and as quickly as she dreamed them, she saw her own hand painting them on the walls.

Then something shifted like a sudden tremor. She looked up. The roof was coming off, had come off, and a single great eye was looking down on her.

She woke. Tomasso the stable hand was sleeping beside her on the bed. Her first lover. The afternoon light was fading to gold outside, the noise of the street became its soft sundown self, and no strange eye glared down from the ceiling.

She breathed evenly and sat up, which awakened Tomasso. He shook his head, at first frowning but then grinning as he saw her beside him with his monk robe held to her breasts. Then frowning again. ‘A strange nap, my love,’ he crooned in his raw country accent. ‘Such dreams. A great big house that was a small house, a huge eye above me... And were you there? I can’t remember.’

She felt a cold ball of fear in her belly. She got out of bed, wrapped his robe about herself like a shroud. ‘What’re you saying, Tomassino?’ she barked at him, her voice so much harsher than she’d meant.

‘Nothing... amore mio. Just silly things. I dreamt a palace, while we slept, like a... wait!’ Perturbed, his dark eyebrows moving together in puzzlement. ‘Like that toy house on your table.’

‘Not a toy, Tomasso. It’s a design made by my late father. Un plastico. Like a sketch, but made in wood and plaster. A palace.’

‘The palace of the diamonds? The one the duke rejected?’

‘Yes, the design of the palace which Duke Alfonso commissioned, which Duchess Lucrezia told him she hated. My father made this model as a guide for builders, but it’ll never be built.’

Tomasso’s eyes widened, his dark eyes fixed on her. ‘Then it’s a cursed thing, Alessina! It has the malocchio! In my village...’

‘Yes, Tomasso, I know about the evil eye, all about curses and bad talismans. I’m from a village too. I just look like a city sophisticate to you, ragazzo, but my heart is just as ignorant as yours.’

‘Don’t mock me, Alessa! I can’t bear that you mock me!’ His face was tormented, swirling somewhere between great anger and great shame; like a frightful god and a fearful boy. He might cry, or he might pronounce her death sentence. Or both at once.

She sat back on the bed and held him close. ‘There’s no curse, Tomassino, just a strange dream is all. Calm yourself, my brave boy, and kiss me here. And here. And here...’

This time there was no dream after love. Only the great darkness of oblivion and the soundless abyss of no-time. A nothing like the great blackness in the pupil of the eye regarding from on high.

When she woke again, it was not with a start but with an imperceptible progression from the deepest of voids to a lighter level of dark. Her head was gripped by an ache like an iron band. The a scent of horses and sex clung to tangled sheets. Her mouth felt coarse, abraded with an aftertaste of dried blood and dust mixed thick.

It was the night, no moon at all. Low thunder rumbled closer now. Her skin was pocked with chill and the prickling agitation of the storm. Slowly, painfully, she sat up and felt for the old chest that served as bedside table. She found there the pitcher of cool water and drank deep. She tried to think herself back into wakefulness, but could remember nothing of her life before this void.

A silent flash of lightning lit up the room. Strange murals flickered on the walls and a gigantic eye appeared above. She gasped and dropped the pitcher. Water spilled out to soak the bed.

She got out and stood naked, reaching across for the water pitcher. A clap of thunder, angry, close and loud. Another flash. Tomasso, lying there on the far side of the bed. Another snap of thunder, a hammer blow. She reached out to him, called his name. Shook him and called louder. She screamed out his name, grasped his arm. Only then did she notice that his body was as cold as the damp chill sheets on the bed.

No sleep this long night after, just collapsed on the floor beside the bed, not even crying, not even anything. A time without time staring into the thunderous dark and holding a cold dead hand. Lightning lit the room in scattered flashes but there was no more to see: no eye, no murals of godlike couplings on the walls, nothing at all.

At last came the gray light before dawn and her eyes could see. Two half-finished paintings on easels: an old man with a hesitant face and a strong young man in a toga looking like a demigod. There was a stack of rolled-up papers in one corner. And a tiny model palace on the table.

And on the bed: a body without any mark or wound upon it, a beautiful cold young man who seemed only to be sleeping.

The wagoneer accepted her silver necklace to take both the large coffer and Alessandra herself out to the countryside, to the abandoned farm that she’d said was her birthplace. She told him that she had to bury her father in his home village, but she had no money to give to the local priest, who was in any case a man known to molest distressed young women like herself. For a silver ring, and a stone that she said was a ruby, the wagon driver agreed to bury the coffer for her under an oak tree just outside the village. By noon they were back in the city of Ferrara.

‘I’m so sorry for the death of your father, my little sister. I swear to you it was an error. I will rectify my mistake. On this I give you my word.’

The witch knelt on the floor of the squalid lean-to hut built against the city walls, her hands outstretched in supplication and her wild black hair bent low. She was named Karlina, daughter of Karla the poisoner. Alessandra had found the witch by dreaming: dreaming the guide that led her to this killer.

And now a curse of her own lay on Karlina, a retribution that would cost the witch her life named the Holy Inquisition. Alessandra had only to say the word, and Karlina would be snatched up by inquisitors, tortured for endless days, and finally consigned to the merciful flames of Christ. Perhaps herself too, along with Karlina; but Alessandra no longer cared about any of that. She cared only for vendetta, blood for blood.

When she’d returned from disposing of the body, there was the question of what to do with the intricately detailed model which haunted her dreams and had cost two men their lives. The obvious thing was to burn it and be free of the curse. But if Alessandra did that, she would never find the answer to her question: Who laid the curse on this thing, and why?

She worked day and night to finish the painting of Tomasso as Saint Anthony. Around this youthful cadaver she created the demons who tempted him, their forms taken from the visions on the wall of the dream palace, converted now to a more everyday evil. Satyrs became grimacing imps with doomed expressions; nymphs became hellish incubi with soft breasts and claws reaching out for gouged eyes. It wasn’t the nightmare world that she saw in her visits to the palazzo, but it was something her paying clients would recognize and accept as the comforting hell they understood.

As she worked, so she dreamed: each exhausted moment of respite on her bed, or simply slumped upon the floor, she dreamed new visits to this haunted palace that did not and could not ever exist. No longer naked, she now wore the hairshirt of a desert anchorite, a hermit seeking a vision.

At first it was hard to find her way around. Her father’s plan for the palace was unconventional, and the doorways led off in strange directions. And then, at unexpected times, the roof would come off and the great unpitying eye would look down on her. She would wake then, and she knew the gaze was not meant for her. Was she somehow special, protected from its malevolence?

She found it hard to grieve the loss of Tomasso until the moment came to deliver up the painting to her clients at The Sacred Family Basilica. Then, only as she was paid the forty silver soldi that she was owed on commission, only then did she weep for her first and only lover.

The churchmen looked at her, with her hollow eyes and her ash-sprinkled bedraggled hair, shrugged, and called her a mere girlish apprentice, not yet one who could part with work with grace worthy of a master artist. They carped at the details of the altarpiece, the unconventional demons and the strapping deathlike saint, but after all the complaints they paid up and let her go.

And that very night she found the secret hidden in her father’s dream palace. It was under the great chandelier in the main hall. Lifting one of the floortiles, a black one, she found it. It was a heart – only the size of a flea, but it was a human heart. The great eye looked down on her and she saw now that it was her own eye: red-streaked with exhaustion and grief, but her own blue iris around a pupil all of unseeable black.

Now she spoke to the witch Karlina in her lean-to hut: ‘When I awoke that last time I knew where I had to seek. I lifted off the roof and looked inside. With a jeweller’s glass over my eye, using a pair of fine tweezers, I lifted the black tile and found it. The heart which you used for your enchantment. Shrunken to the size of a flea, yet with all the potency of death contained within its smallness.’

Karlina lifted her head and spoke: ‘Oh my sister, the wrong house!’ She was young, only a touch older than Alessandra, but ravaged by smallpox. Sobbing, she let her head droop once more to the floor.

‘You’re not the only one with enchantments, sister,’ said Alessandra. ‘My mother was also of your kind, a midwife given to spells and talismans. Dreaming, I found the heart. With a different kind of dream, a waking dream, I followed where it led me that night to the place it had come from. It led me to your house.’ She took the hands of her father’s killer and lifted her to her feet. ‘Face me now, dark sister. Tell me all. Why did you kill my father?’

The witch faced her accuser, eyes now dry. ‘It was my mother Karla who did it, contracted by your father’s rival, the architect Ludovico Rosetti. She poisoned him so Rosetti would be given the commission to build the new palace. Soon after he had her strangled by a henchman so there would be none alive to betray him.’

She was swaying on her feet. Alessandra spoke: ‘But he didn’t know about you.’ She made Karlina sit on the three-legged stool in the middle of the tiny hut and squatted down beside her. She felt as if she could sleep through a thousand hideous deaths and not wake once. The witch’s small hut smelled of sharp fragrances of dried dangerous things.

Karlina went on: ‘I vowed to place a curse on Master Rosetti to avenge my mother’s murder. I was told that there were two architects’ models in the Duke’s castle. The one I needed to hex was the one with fluted columns, whatever those are. But when I got into the castle I found only one model. I placed the curse in it and left, hoping it was the right model. It had columns.’

‘Not fluted, plain. My father was a classicist. That’s what Lucrezia Borgia disliked about his design, they said. Her preference for decorated columns is the source of this whole vile mess.’

Karlina wailed. ‘I know nothing of architects and their fancy imaginings! I saw the model there, and I placed the heart. I’m so sorry that it killed your man, my sister!’

‘And why did it never harm me, this hex?’ asked Alessandra.

‘Can you not guess, girl? This cursed heart is your father’s heart, made tiny and dense with hate, charged to bring vengeance upon his rival. He could never harm you, not even with the most potent of my charms laid upon him.’

New serving wenches wait most charmingly on the Duke’s new master builder, the architect Ludovico Rosetti. He’s come to the city tavern this night to celebrate his commission. Tomorrow, work starts in earnest on his new palazzo design. For now he buys drinks for the master masons and bids them to drink deep.

The maids, new to this place, one dark, one blonde, are playful wenches. They cavort around the architect and dangle grapes before him. They pour wine directly from the jug into his mouth and giggle most fetchingly as he sputters. Nobody sees a tiny speck, size of a flea, that the blonde wench drops into his wine goblet. The master builder drinks and laughs.

A harlequin troubadour strikes up a merry tune. The girls skip, the masons clap. All at once the architect Rosetti gurgles and gasps. All laugh. He’s making a jape, the master, not so solemn after all.

But it’s not as they think. Master architect Rosetti pushes forward and drops to his knees. He’s puking wine, the drunkard. Wait – it’s not wine.

Blood. The master builder is drowning in his own blood. It rushes up as he kneels there, it’s a great fountain burbling from his throat like an ornamental feature.

Now the innards bubble up, the swatches and gobbets of gut and spleen, bursting up from the gaping jaws as architect Rosetti keels over to one side and spews his life out on the tavern floor.

The masons lean over from their benches and their eyes are wide. Some bricklayer lads at the back themselves begin to puke. But normal vomit, not whatever that was.

And the two serving wenches, hand in hand, they walk towards the tavern door. Their stupor is such that they’re smiling; grinning, these hysterical women are. But the shock will be so much the worse for them when their foolish female brains have caught up with the terrible thing that’s happened here.