Catherine looked at Gianni’s watch. It was almost 10.30pm.
They were engaged, but in spite of this and the fact that she was already in her 20s, she still had to be home by a certain time. Gianni hated it.
But time it was. They had been courting in the shadows, down a little lane, and, still whispering sweet nothings to each other, they walked slowly down the lane to the main road, lingering as long as possible.
There is now a garden and a housing estate on the main road which leads to Żabbar, but then it used to be an open piece of ground with a rubble wall round the perimeter. Gianni and his pals often played football there but his thoughts that night were miles away from sport.
As they went round the corner, they came abruptly into a pool of light from the street lamp. Before their eyes had properly adjusted, Gianni gave a startled cry and grabbed Catherine’s arm even tighter.
Leaning back against the wall was a man, wearing a long, dark cloak, his face hidden in its shadows.
He swears that the man was much taller than normal, almost seven feet tall, but it was not that that had caused him to pull away. The man had an aura of threat, almost of evil.
Catherine ignored him, wanting to get home before her dad noticed how late she was. But Gianni refused to pass by the stranger, pulling her over to the other side of the road.
As they walked down the road, the only sound was the tap-tapping of Catherine’s heels. Gianni looked back anxiously over his shoulder but the man still stood there, not moving, in the pool of light.
Gianni felt rather silly about it. Looking back on it in the cold light of day, so to speak, he could not explain why he had felt threatened.
Till four days later.
He just pushed straight between us. I shivered… I felt frozen where he had brushed against me...
He was at the band club playing billiards with a friend, when Reno pulled him over to a quieter part of the room.
“Gianni, you’ll never believe this,” he started. “You know the field, the one where we play football? Well, a few days ago, I was walking Rita home and we were, you know, holding hands. And then I saw this man coming up towards us, and, I don’t know why, but I felt really frightened of him. I suppose it was because I couldn’t see his face, because he was wearing some sort of long cloak. Anyway, he just pushed straight between us. I shivered, I can tell you that. I felt frozen where he had brushed against me...”
It had been the same day, the same place, Żabbar, in 1951.
Seven years later, an oil company was drilling by the bastions there. One night a power cut plunged the engineers into darkness. One of them, a Scottish guy, was sent out to investigate.
He walked up to the wall that ran along the side of the bastions, checking the cable connections that they had put there temporarily while they were drilling. Everything seemed to be fine. But his message did not get back to the other engineers, who were still waiting in candlelight for the electricity to be switched on again.
When a few hours had passed, another man was sent out to look for him. He was found unconscious by the wall. When they managed to revive him, he said that a tall man, wearing a dark cloak, had just picked him up like a rag doll and thrown him against the wall.
These three ‘sightings’ of a tall, cloaked man, would qualify for the title of strange all of their own.
But years later, Gianni found a book in a jumble sale in Canada. In it there was the story of an Englishman, Humphrey Saunders, who died in mysterious circumstances in the Verdala barracks in 1935.
Across the square, he could see a remarkably tall man in a long, dark cloak, standing motionless under one of the mess windows. Something about the appearance of this solitary shrouded figure attracted his attention. To be wearing such clothes in a Mediterranean heatwave seemed peculiar.
With a leap, the cloaked man sprang onto the window sill and disappeared through the curtains into the mess... Then after a few seconds, an ear-piercing scream rang out – a harsh, appalling cry of rage and terror, and to his horror and utter amazement, he saw the man reappear at the window with Saunders in his arms. Both men vanished around the corner...
He ran to the mess and found the card room in chaos. On the floor, surrounded by half a dozen officers, lay Saunders, dead.
A formal military inquiry revealed that no civilian was in the garrison after 10pm that day.
“The card players testified in their evidence that a momentary gust of wind seemed to shake the nearest window. Simultaneously, the card table was stirred and Saunders, throwing his hands up into the air, slumped in his chair gasping as though in a fit. Medical evidence showed that he had died of a heart attack...”
(Strange Destinies, by Jon Macklin, published by ACE)
This is the 18th in a series of short stories The Sunday Times of Malta is running every Sunday. It is taken from The Unexplained Plus (Allied Publications) by Vanessa Macdonald. The first edition was published in 2001 and reprinted twice. It was republished, with added stories, as The Unexplained Plus. The Maltese version of the book, Ta’ Barra Minn Hawn (Klabb Kotba Maltin), is available from all leading bookstores and stationers and from www.bdlbooks.com.