The Cask of Amontillado by Edgar Allen Poe

A nice creepy story by Poe involving a large amount of fortified wine used as a lure to bump someone off, The Cask of Amontillado is narrated by Montresor, an Italian nobleman, who wreaks a terrible revenge on another noble, Fortunato, whom he believes has insulted him.

Montresor has gone out to the local carnival in search of his quarry. He needs to bait the line and remembers that Fortunato, a braggart and a bullshit artist, likes to think of himself as a master wine-buff:

He had a weak point—this Fortunato—although in other regards he was a man to be respected and even feared. He prided himself on his connoisseurship in wine. Few Italians have the true virtuoso spirit. For the most part their enthusiasm is adopted to suit the time and opportunity—to practise imposture upon the British and Austrian millionaires. In painting and gemmary, Fortunato, like his countrymen, was a quack—but in the matter of old wines he was sincere. In this respect I did not differ from him materially: I was skilful in the Italian vintages myself, and bought largely whenever I could.

Fortunato himself is discovered stumbling around the carnival in jester’s motley:

He accosted me with excessive warmth, for he had been drinking much. The man wore motley. He had on a tight-fitting parti-striped dress, and his head was surmounted by the conical cap and bells. I was so pleased to see him, that I thought I should never have done wringing his hand.
I said to him—"My dear Fortunato, you are luckily met. How remarkably well you are looking to-day! But I have received a pipe of what passes for Amontillado, and I have my doubts."
"How?" said he. "Amontillado? A pipe? Impossible! And in the middle of the carnival!"
"I have my doubts," I replied; "and I was silly enough to pay the full Amontillado price without consulting you in the matter. You were not to be found, and I was fearful of losing a bargain."
"Amontillado!"
"I have my doubts."
"Amontillado!"
"And I must satisfy them."
"Amontillado!"
"As you are engaged, I am on my way to Luchesi. If any one has a critical turn, it is he. He will tell me—"
"Luchesi cannot tell Amontillado from Sherry."

The bait taken, Montresor takes Fortunato back to his palazzo and then down to the cellars beneath the house. It’s cold and damp and the walls are white with nitre so he warns Fortunato, who has a terrible cough already, that it might prove injurious to his health:

"Enough," he said; "the cough is a mere nothing; it will not kill me. I shall not die of a cough."
"True—true," I replied; "and, indeed, I had no intention of alarming you unnecessarily—but you should use all proper caution. A draught of this Medoc will defend us from the damps."
Here I knocked off the neck of a bottle which I drew from a long row of its fellows that lay upon the mould.
"Drink," I said, presenting him the wine.

They knock out a couple of glasses, before setting off further into the vaults. Montresor tries one more time to time to dissuade his adversary from continuing. The unwitting victim scoffs, downs a glass of De Grâve in one go, then pretends he’s a Mason:

"The nitre!" I said: "see, it increases. It hangs like moss upon the vaults. We are below the river's bed. The drops of moisture trickle among the bones. Come, we will go back ere it is too late. Your cough—"
"It is nothing," he said; "let us go on. But first, another draught of the Medoc."
I broke and reached him a flagon of De Grâve. He emptied it at a breath. His eyes flashed with a fierce light. He laughed and threw the bottle upwards with a gesticulation I did not understand.

Montresor responds by producing his trowel from under his cloak. Unperturbed, Fortunato carries on towards the prize, the nonexistent cask of sherry. He is guided into a small niche at the back of the cellar.

It was in vain that Fortunato, uplifting his dull torch, endeavored to pry into the depths of the recess. Its termination the feeble light did not enable us to see.
"Proceed," I said; "herein is the Amontillado. As for Luchesi—"
"He is an ignoramus," interrupted my friend, as he stepped unsteadily forward, while I followed immediately at his heels. In an instant he had reached the extremity of the niche, and finding his progress arrested by the rock, stood stupidly bewildered. A moment more and I had fettered him to the granite.

The vengeful Montresor then proceeds to wall up the niche, leaving the unfortunate Fortunato immured...

Blood on the Saddle by Rafael Reig

Perhaps it was the translation, but Rafael Reig’s Blood on the Saddle reminds me more than a little of Charles Bukowski, especially his novel Pulp (qv).

Carlos Clot is a private detective in the Madrid of the near-future, a city that’s been swamped by water and half buried in the sand. One of his cases involves a character who has gone missing from a cowboy novel by Phil Sparks, better know to his family as Luis Peñuelas. Peñuelas can’t finish the book without her coming back, and Clot somehow has to find her in an increasingly surreal city filled with body snatchers, adulterous housewives and a sinister genetic engineering corporation run by the ruthless Manex Chopieta...

Clot is having no luck finding the heroine of Peñuelas’s new book, and the hapless writer, already a souse, hits the bottle for the last time. By the time Clot catches up with his old friend the man is in the throes of delirium:

It was hard for me to recognise him. Peñuelas/Sparks had deteriorated a lot since the last time. Out of the corner of his eye he watched his elasticated blue folder while he drank Bombay as if it were tap water. –There’s now way out, he kept repeating. Nothing to be done... He heard voices, received instructions and fended off invisible interlocutors with his hands. He described what seemed to be the DTs to me with their corresponding zootropic hallucinations and anatomical deliriums. He saw insects or was convinced he had one arm longer than the other, things like that. He spoke of his heart as a puddle of rainwater; his blood, the shadow of a tree that went on growing once day was done... –They’re coming for me, Peñuelas went on. You have to help me, Clot, my friend.

There’s nobody there but the two of them, of course, not that Peñuelas will listen:

In a supine position he went on drinking directly from the bottle. When the pins and needles started he began to scream. Hundreds of insects were running over his arms. He admitted he couldn’t see them, but he felt them, they were there, on his body, tiny and tireless. He lit the anglepoise. Nothing. Maybe there were too small to pick out with the naked eye, as he revealed to me. he scratched his arms with his nails, completely beside himself. –Peñuelas! Control yourself! You’re raving. This is formication, that’s all. –Oh shit! Fornication! Oh fuck! I knew it! The treacherous cow! –With an M, Peñuelas. It means you’re imagining ants, that’s all. Next he seemed to see it all clearly: the insects had to be under his skin!

After scratching his arms to pieces he feels as if he’s burning up. Tearing off his shirt, he makes for the bath:

He decided he couldn’t faint; that was precisely what they were waiting for! If he fainted they’d throw themselves upon him, so he began banging his head with ever increasing force against the edge of the bath. This seemed to him a very intelligent idea, a stratagem or ruse, as he termed it. I saw that the enamel of the bathtub was chipping off. I didn’t see, on the other hand, that his skull had sustained a similar kind of impact. I gave him two slaps in the face and called an ambulance. He screamed. We wrestled. I subdued him... They took him away. He died at dawn, without managing to wake up from the other dream, the overwhelming, violent nightmare of arriving, sure, but where?

Probably the most gruesome warning about the perils of drinking neat gin I’ve read since starting this blog...