# The Strange Case of Miss Annie Spragg/Chapter 12

SHE did not know how Miss Annie Spragg had come to take lodgings in the Palazzo Gonfarini. The old maid was already installed when Signora Bardelli took over the post of janitress on the death of the old man who had preceded her as caretaker. Miss Annie Spragg was already established and a fixture she remained. She was not a troublesome tenant. She did not, like some of Signora Bardelli's lodgers, return home drunk or beat her children or stab indiscriminately the other lodgers. She seemed to have no wants and in all the years she lived there she had never made a complaint. She was very clean and seemed content with a room which contained only a bed, a chair and a washstand. She always paid her rent regularly until three weeks before her death, and then, of course, she could not pay it because her money had come to an end. Where this money had come from Signora Bardelli did not know. Miss Annie Spragg had never in all the years she had lived in the Palazzo Gonfarini received a letter. She had no friends and much of her time was spent in the churches, mainly at San Giovanni before the celebrated paintings of Saint John the Shepherd. She had learned to speak a ​little Italian but she was never really able to converse in that tongue.
In the third year after the janitress came to the Palazzo Gonfarini, Miss Annie Spragg came one day and asked her if she knew where there was a place she could go in the mountains to pass a month now and then. It must be very cheap, she said, because she had no money, and she would like it to be in some rather remote region where she would not be troubled by tourists. Signora Bardelli thought at once of her sister-in-law who lived in a village called Bestia, high in a remote part of the mountains. She sent word by a cousin (since neither the sister-in-law nor her husband could read) and received an answer that they would be glad of the money to be got by having the visitor. It was arranged to meet Miss Annie Spragg at Analo, which was the terminal of the railroad. Beyond Analo there were only mountain roads and donkey carts.
It was a wild country, said the janitress, which she had not seen since childhood. There were a few olive orchards and herds of goats and half-way down the mountains they were able to grow vines in the crevices of the volcanic rock. There were wolves which in winter became ferocious and sometimes attacked people in remote villages and farms. At Bestia there was no church and the inhabitants were forced to drive all the way to Analo to communicate with a priest. Therefore, they seldom saw priests except when someone died or was born. Sometimes children grew to manhood and womanhood and died without ever being received into the ​church. They had a kind of religion of their own which was a mixture of Christianity and old legends, half lost in the mists of time. It was at Bestia that Signora Bardelli had learned the science of herbs and charms. The people there knew about such things and one old woman, long since dead, had taught all she knew to the janitress.
(She had long sold herbs and charms to the poor, the janitress said, but it was only since she had acquired the bed of Miss Annie Spragg and lost her place as janitress that she had really set herself up in a legitimate way.)
The family of the sister-in-law consisted of the mother and father (a goatherd) and eleven children. There was a room over the stable which they gave to Miss Annie Spragg when she arrived bearing a straw suitcase and an empty bird cage. The entire family slept in one room.
From the beginning their strange lodger proved a help to them. She asked nothing and she paid regularly. She did not talk much and spent a great deal of time on the mountain, setting out in the morning with bread and cheese and a little wine, and returning at sunset. On her second visit she offered timidly to watch Giusseppi's goats while they wandered along the mountainside. These were willful and troublesome goats which wandered off into ravines and woods and caused Giusseppi much anxiety, but with Miss Annie Spragg their character appeared to undergo a change. They became docile and stayed near her while she was making watercolor sketches or knitting clothes for Giusseppi's half-clad family or simply wandering about over the ​mountainside gathering wild flowers and listening to the birds. She was a great help to Giusseppi because her taking charge of the goats freed another son to help him in the rude orchards and vineyards. People began to notice that she had a strange power over animals and to regard her with respect. It was only the wife (Signora Bardelli's sister-in-law) who did not like her. She thought there was something strange about the lodger and even spread the story that Miss Annie Spragg had the power of the evil eye.
Among the children of the sister-in-law there was one, a little girl of nine, who, her parents believed, was possessed of a devil. The old priest from Analo had tried to exorcise the demon and when he had failed they sought the aid of the old woman who was the herb doctor. She also tried and failed. The child's name was Peppina and she gave them a great deal of trouble. She was a pretty child with thick black hair and great black eyes and for days at a time she would be well behaved and docile. But she had seizures when she would run away and hide among the ravines of the mountainside. Sometimes they would not find her for days. Once she fell into a stream and was nearly drowned and on another time she set fire to the house in which they lived. She fell down at times in a fit and had strange visions.
Upon this child Miss Annie Spragg had the same effect as upon the goats. With the old maid Peppina remained docile and well behaved, but as soon as Miss Annie Spragg left Bestia the child began once more to cause them trouble and they had to ​beat her and try new ways of driving out the demon. When she was eleven she took to accompanying the old maid and the goats when they set out in the morning to feed on the mountainside.
For five years Miss Annie Spragg went each summer to occupy the room over the stable at Bestia and each time when she returned to the Palazzo Gonfarini she brought with her a cage filled with small birds, most of them being a kind of sparrow which frequented the mountains and because of its smallness was worth nothing as food to the peasants. When she left her room in the Palazzo Gonfarini in the spring Miss Annie Spragg opened the window and allowed them to escape. Signora Bardelli believed they were always the same birds. They spent the winter at the Palazzo Gonfarini and flew back in summer to rejoin Miss Annie Spragg at Bestia. Once she even brought back with her a box filled with field mice.
In Bestia they no longer thought her queer. She became a part of the place. They even came to date things by the arrival and the departure of the old maid, as if her coming marked the beginning of summer and her departure the arrival of the long Italian autumn.
She might have continued going summer after summer to Bestia, said Signora Bardelli, but a strange thing happened. One night at midnight her brother-in-law was awakened by the smell of smoke and discovered that the house was burning. At first he believed that it was the demon in Peppina who had set the fire a second time, but when he had awakened all his family he discovered that Peppina ​was not there at all. He discovered too that the lodger's room above the stable was empty and that in the stable the goats had disappeared. When he had put out the fire he set out to find the goats.
In the darkness he went up the mountainside calling out Peppina's name and uttering at intervals the half-human, half-animal cry which he used in calling the goats when they had strayed. But there was no answer. He had wandered for hours over the rocks and pastures when dawn at last began to slip in through the valleys and crevasses and down the wild rocky slopes, and he turned toward home. Cold blue mist veiled the hillside and clung to the groves of ancient olive trees planted among the outcroppings of grey tufa. The poor man, not knowing what to think, began to believe that Peppina's demon had swept Peppina and their lodger and his goats off into limbo. As his bewilderment increased he became certain that he would never see any of them again. He regretted the loss of Peppina, said the ex-janitress, far less than he regretted the loss of the goats, for she was only a source of trouble to her parents and goats were valuable property. He began to fret over what he would tell the police when it was discovered that Miss Annie Spragg too had been swallowed up. He told himself that this was what came of having to do with a strange foreign woman, and that his wife was right in suspecting her of being a witch.
In the midst of his reflections he heard suddenly the faint far-off tinkle of the bell that the black he-goat wore about his neck, and halting, he stood listening until he made certain that he was not ​imagining the sound, and then to discover from what direction the sound came. Looking down he saw far below him, half hidden in mists so that it was visible one moment and not the next, a little procession which had a strange likeness to a procession of children on their way from a first communion. At the head walked sedately the black he-goat who wore the bell, and behind him came all the herd. In the rear, like the parents who followed the children, walked Miss Annie Spragg and Peppina. They seemed to be wearing wreaths on their heads and Miss Annie Spragg was without the black veil she always wore.
There was no way of descending directly to them and the puzzled man was forced to go by the tortuous narrow paths that led down among the rocks and trees. When he reached the bottom of the crevasse the procession had disappeared, but there remained in the red earth the neat little prints of goat's hoofs.
When he reached the farm once more it was quite light but he found that all his family were still asleep, and that beside the oven on her mattress of straw Peppina was also sleeping soundly. In the stable the goats were in their pen as they should have been and when he entered they pushed forward behind their leader, the black he-goat, to be led out to feed. And in the room overhead Miss Annie Spragg was asleep. On the floor beside her there were a few bruised and withered laurel leaves.
Thinking that he too must be possessed of a demon who had driven him out on the mountain in the middle of the night for nothing, the poor man ​returned and roused his wife, telling her all that he had seen. Because he was confused and could not believe his senses they examined the beams above the oven to make certain there had ever been a fire. There had been a fire. The beams were all charred. They went to awaken Peppina but she could not be awakened. They struck her and called her evil names but the girl only slept on quietly. The smaller children wakened and began to scream with fright, and in all the confusion the father lost his head and sat down and wept. But his wife did not take leave of her senses. She cried out that their lodger was a witch and that she had known it all along and now they would be free of her at last. She went to the stable and roused Miss Annie Spragg, who said nothing in reply to the woman's abuse but packed her shabby bag in silence. Then the old maid set out along the road to Analo carrying her bag, her cage of little birds and her box of water colors. The wife followed her for three miles along the road, hiding from time to time in the bushes and behind rocks to watch and make certain that she did not return and to see whether she might not vanish abruptly into thin air.
When the figure of the old maid had disappeared at last on the serpentine road leading down the mountain to the high valley of Analo, the woman returned to the lonely farm and taking beeswax and three red hairs and seven nail parings from a little box, she moulded the beeswax into the image of the thin old maid and embedded the nail parings and the three hairs deep in the wax, and sticking a pin through the place where the heart should have been, ​she threw the whole thing into the oven. She had been waiting all the while. The red hair was Miss Annie Spragg's hair and the parings were the parings of Miss Annie Spragg's nails.
When the image had gone up in a burst of flame, Peppina stirred on her bed and wakened, but when they talked to her she could remember nothing. She had, she said, been asleep in her bed all the night.
She was fifteen years old at the time, and developed like a woman of thirty.
But it was the end of Peppina, said Signora Bardelli. After that the demon claimed her for his own. She had many respectable suitors, some of whom were rich, but she would have none of them and ran off in the end with a corporal of the Carabinieri, who had been sent into the mountains to run to earth a notorious brigand. He was a gigantic and ugly brute, more like an animal than a man. He beat her cruelly and was stabbed to death at last by a man he found in Peppina's bed when he came home unexpectedly. After that Peppina disappeared. A young native of Analo returning from South America said he had seen her there in a brothel on the water front of Rio de Janeiro. She was dancing naked in the midst of a circle of sailors, white men and black men, yellow men and brown men. But no one knew for certain that the woman was Peppina.