For one of our first posts, we are very pleased to present this short story by scholar and fiction author Mercedes Aguirre Castro. The story, a modern re-working of a three-thousand-year-old tale, first appeared in its original Spanish as “La escena del crimen” in her edited book Tras las huellas de los mitos: voces femeninas actuales (On the Trail of Myths: Current Female Voices, Ediciones de la Torre, Madrid 2021). Until now, it had never been published in English. This translation from the Spanish is by Richard Buxton.
The Blinding of Polyphemus. Cast reconstruction of the sculpture group from Sperlonga, Italy. Photo by Carole Raddato. Wikimedia Commons. CC-BY-SA-2.0.
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They had received a call-out, but didn’t know exactly what they were going to find. Someone had phoned to report a suspicious scene where a crime might have been committed, although the officer who took the call said no details had been given. The person on the other end of the line had not specified what had been discovered; the caller had simply mentioned a location on the outskirts on the Monte Gorna road, and then hung up.
There were four of them, all from the forensic department, three men and a woman. They had come from Catania in a van containing a small laboratory for storing and processing samples. But they had had to leave the vehicle by the side of the road, and then, carrying part of the equipment, climb up a steep track rising between rocks and thickets till they reached the spot which had been indicated.
They were very close to Etna, the volcano that dominated the island. The slope was precipitous and stony, in an area where the mountain was no longer covered in black rock formed out of solidified lava, and vegetation was beginning to force its way through. From there you could see the sea, whose azure brilliance almost hurt the eyes.
But they weren’t bothered about the landscape. The work that had taken them there left them no time to enjoy beautiful panoramas, or the warm, sunny evening which would bring out the tourists onto the local beaches.
A few metres higher up they came across the enormous opening of a cave. The capricious shapes created by the rocks and vegetation made it resemble the mouth of a petrified monster. The rays of the sun as it penetrated between the branches produced alternations of shade and light, contributing to the impression of something alive and in movement.
What an awful stink, was the first reaction of Martina Vittorini, the Chief Inspector of the team, when they finally entered the cave. She tried to identify the smell. Stables. Maybe rancid milk.
‘And the body?’ The question posed by Luigi Borromei, a young officer who had recently joined the team, was the one they all had in mind.
‘There isn’t one. No one said there was a body.’
‘So what are we supposed to be looking for?’
‘Anything to confirm what happened. If we can establish that a crime has been committed, then there’ll be an investigation.’
It was Martina’s job to direct the work. It wasn’t easy being a woman in her position but, in spite of the machismo often displayed by the Sicilian police, she had managed, not without a great deal of effort, to earn the confidence and respect of her colleagues.
The cavern was deep, with irregular walls and a roof several metres high. In some places it was difficult even to guess at the height, since the light of their torches did not reach that far.
A quick look was sufficient to verify that there was indeed no corpse there. Apparently, the cave was empty.
****
An hour had passed, and the team was still at work. Traces of blood and suspicious organic material had led them to accept the idea that the location could certainly be regarded as a crime scene. Yet there was still no definitive proof of exactly what had occurred.
They took the samples they had collected to the mobile lab, where they were already trying to process some data. Only the minute analysis of the remains would shed light on whether a violent act had taken place, and, if so, how it had been carried out.
One area of the cave contained traces of blackened wood and ash, clear confirmation that there had been a fire. Their torch beams illuminated the varying colouration on the ground.
‘This looks like more blood,’ Giuseppe Monticello pointed out.
Martina agreed. The bloodstains in themselves were already a sign of a violent act, especially as they were spattered in different directions. But they weren’t yet sure if everything they had found was human blood. They also collected samples of a sticky substance, found on various parts of the floor and the walls.
‘I still don’t know what we’re supposed to be looking for,’ grumbled Luigi, who, maybe because of his lack of experience, had the habit of complaining about almost everything. ‘I’ve never come up against such a confusing place.’
‘Or such a smelly one,’ added Martina with a smile, trying to relax the tension.
They walked to and fro. Ceaselessly. From the cave to the lab, from the lab to the cave.
‘Take all the fingerprints you can find.’
‘Come over here!’
Martina looked towards her colleague Giuseppe, who was beckoning them from deep inside the cave. She put down her small case and went to join him. Luigi followed her.
They directed their torches at the ground, which at that point was covered in grey sand.
A footprint. Without doubt, a footprint. Not the impression of a shoe, though, but of a naked foot—of much greater than normal human size.
Their first reaction was to take a step back, as if the strangeness of the discovery went beyond anything they were familiar with.
Martina took photographs and made measurements. Lorenzo Bravo, the oldest member of the team, and a man who had seen it all—or almost all—before, shone his torch around to look for the companion footprint—if there was one. But he didn’t find anything. It was true that after a short distance the sand disappeared, giving way to bare rock. Blackish rock, glistening with moisture.
Luigi was looking more and more anxious.
‘I can’t explain it. Who on earth can the print belong to? Or is all of this a practical joke, someone trying to pull our leg?’
Martina said nothing. No point in speculating before the tests, the photos and the samples had been analysed.
A little later, carrying all the material they had collected, they went back to the van in order to return to the city and carry on working. The cave remained cordoned off, above all for reasons of security, in case they needed to revisit it.
****
Martina Vittorini’s team had been dealing with the case for days, without rest and virtually without a break. They had searched the regional archives for data about this particular cave. It had certainly been used to keep animals and to store cheese; not only did this information match some of the physical evidence they had found, it also confirmed what the local shepherds reported. But the same shepherds maintained that no one used the cave now—indeed no one even dared to enter it. No, they hadn’t used it to keep their own flocks. They were frightened of it. Long ago, they said, horrible things had happened there, and a superstitious terror had spread through the neighbouring region. Luigi’s assumption was that it was the proximity of the always unpredictable volcano that had awaken this kind of fear.
But there was one person who had not been frightened of the cave. Someone had committed a murder there.
The evidence was available, but it was hard to make sense of it. The forensic doctor had analysed the remains of human tissue to try to determine its origin. There was animal tissue too—ewes and rams. And there was also burnt wood, perhaps from a hearth. There were no traces of personal items which might have led to an identification.
The final results to emerge from the analysis of the samples were even more worrying.
‘It’s brain tissue, together with some splinters of bone. As if someone had crushed the skull of another person. Or rather, more than one person.’
Strangest of all was the footprint.
The computer had corroborated the correctness of the identification as the trace of a human foot. But the size did not correspond. It was at least three times larger than human size.
Could they have made a mistake?
The suggestions the team came up with were as wild as you could imagine: a gigantic man, an artificial print made by an object in the form of a human foot ….
‘Maybe it will turn out to have been an extraterrestrial,’ was Luigi’s comment, aimed at drawing a smile out of his companions.
‘And the other prints?’
‘In the archives,’ Giuseppe confirmed,’ there’s no match with missing persons in Catania or the surrounding region.’
‘We’ve still got nothing concrete,’ observed Martina. ‘Plenty of human fingerprints, from at least six different people, traces of animals too, but nothing to help us to advance the investigation.’
Not that she hadn’t had difficult cases in her career. They used to say that the dead ‘talked’. The careful analysis of a crime scene was what led them to uncover the truth.
‘And the weapon?’
‘There’s no evidence that a firearm was discharged. It must have been something else. Probably a wooden object used to smash someone’s head in. Finally, a fire to burn the remains.’
One of the reports from the lab confirmed that the tissue they had found spattered on the ground and the walls was human. But the DNA did not all belong to the same person. There were three different ones.
‘Three men who died with their skulls smashed in?’
‘It looks that way. And who knows? There might have been more that we haven’t found yet.’
‘And there’s something else.’
Martina waited.
‘One tissue sample presents a genetic anomaly. It was stuck to a piece of burnt wood.’
‘What sort of anomaly?’
‘I don’t know. It partly overlaps with human DNA, but not completely. I’ve never seen anything like it.’
The findings multiplied. But no one managed to bring to light and fully reconstruct the events that took place in the cave. They had searched for clues in the surrounding area and on the path which led to the road, and had meticulously combed the hillside where the cave was situated, but had failed to identify any trace which coincided with the samples and prints they had collected. It was as if the characters in this drama—whatever it was that had happened in the depths of the cavern—had vanished into thin air.
Lorenzo and Martina carried on working. The next sample was once again of human tissue. And there was something else. Mixed with the human blood and human remains there was again a trace of the strange DNA.
‘It’s saliva. It looks as if the human remains had been … eaten ….’
Martina’s grimace of disgust did not pass unnoticed in the lab. People in her profession had seen more or less everything there was to see, and had prepared themselves for any sort of unpleasant spectacle. In their investigations she and her colleagues managed to separate their natural repugnance in the face of some of the scenarios they had to work in, from the purely scientific work which led them to help in resolving crimes. But the possibility of a murderer who had gone so far as to eat his victims—that still made them shudder.
What sort of horror had taken place inside that cave?
‘If we stick to the evidence,’ began Lorenzo, once they were all back in the office, somewhat demoralised by the limited progress in the investigation, ‘a partially human creature attacked, killed and ate three men. And later—I’m not certain, but the creature himself might have been attacked by some other men who survived. Whether he got out of it alive, even though wounded, and then made his escape, I’m not sure.’
‘Does that mean there might be a murderous cannibal on the loose round here? It doesn’t sound very likely.’
Lorenzo took his time in replying.
‘You’re absolutely right: it doesn’t make sense. If he’d escaped, we’d have found footprints outside. For the time being we’ll file the case away, in case in the future we can find out more, or other murders are committed on a similar pattern.’
File it away. It wasn’t often they had to admit defeat. Modern technology made everything so much easier. Nevertheless, the absence of a corpse was the major difficulty.
An hour later Martina was at last alone in the office; her colleagues had left together, talking in loud voices about having a coffee. She sat staring at the computer screen, which displayed some data about the case. But she looked without seeing anything. She had suddenly recalled a story, a legend she had read as a child. It was about a one-eyed giant who lived in a cave and who ate some men who had confronted him. The tale went on to relate that the most courageous of the men had come up with the idea of defeating the giant by thrusting a burning stake into his eye. The monster lived on the slopes of Etna.
The problem was that she had never stopped to think that these stories might actually have happened; to her, they were just poems repeated down the centuries. If the poets who composed them had ever been inspired by real events, it must have happened long, long ago.
And yet…. Was it possible that a legend could have survived not in works of poetry, but physically—in the place where the events occurred? That it could have left a real, tangible trace that you could measure and analyse, precisely as she and her team had done?
If people who believe in ghosts maintain that the impact made by a violent act on a place does not disappear, and that it can be perceived to be repeated down the ages, why could the same not be true of cases like these?
But that was something she could not include in her report. No one would believe her, and her professional reputation would suffer.
Martina remained absorbed in her thoughts till she decided that maybe for her too the time had come to go and get a coffee. She needed it.
Then she saw Lorenzo coming back to the office. Behind him were hurrying Luigi and Giuseppe.
‘We’ve been assigned a new case,’ said Lorenzo. ‘This time they have found a body. A woman. It seems someone decapitated her and took away the head.’*
*Translator’s note: The allusion is evidently to the myth of Perseus and the Gorgon Medusa.
Mercedes Aguirre lectured in the Department of Greek Philology of the Universidad Complutense in Madrid. She is currently ‘Profesora Honorifica’ in the same university and Honorary Research Fellow in the University of Bristol. Her research focuses on the literature, iconography, and mythology of Ancient Greece, and the reception of Greek mythology in the modern world. She is also the author of several novels and collections of short stories, many of them inspired by Greek myths. Webpage: https://mercedesaguirrecastro.com