The Witch of Napoli Read Online Free

soldiers left, and villagers dug a hole for her father, the prick Angelo arranges for his fat housekeeper to take Alessandra into their little love nest. That’s when spooky stuff starts to happen. A knife on the kitchen table levitates into the air and flies at the housekeeper. A wine bottle suddenly explodes in the priest’s hand as Alessandra glares at him. The housekeeper accuses her of being possessed by demons, and Father Angelo performs an exorcism on Alessandra before packing her off to an orphanage in Naples run by nuns.
    A nobody ends up a nobody.

Chapter 4
    T hat should have been the end of her story, but it wasn’t.
    Instead, a rich, expatriate British couple, the Croppers, childless and bored with dressing up their dogs, visit the orphanage, discover her and decide to adopt her.
    Alessandra despised them. And why not? An Englishman had killed her father. But she was suspicious of all foreigners. Her father taught her how the Spanish and French and Austrian turds used our country like a cheap whore for centuries before Garibaldi tossed them out on their ass. Besides, she had lived all her short life in the country.
    “I was like a wild animal, a forest bird,” she told me later, “and these foolish
stranieri
foreigners wanted to make me into a prissy English girl. They dressed me in pinafores and starched blouses, demanded that I take a bath every day, and comb my hair, and use a fork at the table. When I refused, they scolded me and I cursed them back in Italian.”
    The Croppers dabbled in Spiritualism, and one evening Mrs. Cropper needed more sitters for her circle. Alessandra was pressed into service, sullenly took her chair, and phantom raps and spooky levitations dramatically increased. Not every night, but enough for the wife to suspect Alessandra might be the one attracting the spirits. She let Alessandra skip her hated piano lessons in return for spending evenings at the séance table. At this stage in her career as a spirit medium, Alessandra didn’t fall into mesmeric trances, and Savonarola hadn’t shown up yet – that stuff came later – but she did hear spirit voices inside her head and parroted their messages to the eager sitters crowded around the table. And when she didn’t hear them, she quickly learned to make things up.
    The English couple gushed in letters to their friends about their little “Sandra” and her most extraordinary and varied supernatural powers. But soon their tone changed, as Alessandra started experimenting on her own.
    “I got bored sitting for hours around the table,” she confessed, “so I started asking the spirits to play tricks on the other sitters. I just closed my eyes and wished hard, and things happened.” How they happened, she didn’t know. Unlike Lombardi, Alessandra never tried to understand her psychic powers. Where they came from – God, the Devil, or her own mind like Lombardi believed – she didn’t care.
    One evening, Mrs. Cropper and her circle of friends begged the hovering spirits to produce an “apport.” An apport is a gift from the spirits – a flower, or coin, or ring that materializes out of thin air.
    After fifteen minutes of fervent singing and praying, they heard a loud thump, turned up the lamps, and discovered a dead rat lying on the table.
    “Two of the women fainted on the spot,” she laughed. “You would have loved it, Tommaso.”
    But the group eventually became suspicious of her and started leaving her out. The final time she was invited, the gas lights were turned up after the séance ended and a gentleman sitter discovered his wallet missing. The next morning, the maid found it hidden in a tin box under Alessandra’s bed. Alessandra brazenly blamed mischievous spirits for teleporting it there. After six months, the Croppers finally threw up their hands in despair. They locked Alessandra in her room, packed up her belongings, and sent the cook off to the convent to tell Mother Superior they were returning