The Eternal City

by Paula Morris

  Well,” said Woody the next morning, handing out pieces of fruit and squashed energy bars. “The breakfast room is closed, and nobody seems to know anything. So this is breakfast, I’m afraid. Okay?”

  Their teacher was trying to sound bright and breezy, Laura thought, but she wasn’t doing a great job of pretending. Laura accepted a bruised banana from her. Woody was rattled, obviously—they all were.

  They now meant Laura, Maia, Dan, and Jack, as well as the two new European kids. They all stood clustered together in the hostel lobby, Dan standing apart from the group with his hands in his pockets, as though he was better than everyone else.

  Laura wished that Morgan was here rather than dozing away in bed on the quarantined floor. Laura was desperate to tell her about the mysterious appearance of a twin star sapphire in her bag—how did it get there? what did it mean?—but Laura wasn’t allowed to visit her. Woody had escorted them down the stairs that morning to make sure they didn’t take any detours into the Forbidden Zone.

  Sofie, her blond hair even spikier today, and wearing jeans so tight Laura wondered how she would be able to sit down, was gazing in open admiration at the Danish boy she’d mentioned last night.

  “Hi,” he said, smiling at Laura. “I’m Kasper. I’m from Copenhagen. The only one left standing from my school, it seems.”

  Laura couldn’t help wishing they had some Vikings at Riverside High. No wonder Sofie got a secret smile on her face just mentioning him. Kasper was so tall he made Dan look average height. His hair was thick and golden, and his eyes were the kind of intense blue that would send most of the girls in Laura’s class into a prolonged giggling fit. He was wearing a checked shirt with rolled-up sleeves, and the kind of baggy, zippy trousers that snowboarders wore. Around his neck dangled a black piece of leather with some kind of orange stone or piece of glass hanging from it.

  “Any more—food?” Woody asked the group, sounding desperate. She tried to shove a limp-looking energy bar in Jack’s direction.

  “I have a nut allergy,” he told her.

  Sofie clucked her tongue. “Americans are allergic to everything,” she muttered.

  “I have a nut allergy also,” said Kasper, toasting Jack with his own unopened bar. “So maybe I am an honorary American.”

  Laura was meanly pleased to see Sofie squirm. If she was trying to impress Kasper, it wasn’t working.

  “Have this orange,” Woody insisted, pulling more fruit from her canvas carryall. “We’re very pleased to have you as an honorary American! Both of you, in fact. We’re a little group today. Just us. I’m Ms. Wilson. Or Fräulein Wilson. Or—ah, whatever ‘Ms.’ is in Danish. Though the students call me Woody, I believe. Ha!”

  Woody—clearly a nervous wreck—grinned in a worrying, maniacal way, and Laura desperately wanted this standing-around-in-the-lobby part to be over. She wasn’t even sure why Sofie was here: She wasn’t on a school trip and didn’t need to be supervised. Maybe she just wanted to hang out with Kasper, and this was the only way.

  “What are we going to do today?” Laura asked finally. “Is it … is it safe to go outside?”

  “Oh!” Woody looked confused. “I think so. The cloud is still up there, of course, but that stuff falling down …”

  “Ash,” Maia told her.

  “Yes, yes, the ash. It’s gone. I mean, it’s up in the sky.” Woody gave a vague wave of one hand. “So we can do something. What would you all like to do?”

  “Can we go off by ourselves?” That was Dan, of course.

  Woody shook her head so hard that her earrings jangled. “I promised Mrs. Johnson that we’d stick together.”

  “What were we supposed to be doing today?” Jack asked. “I lost my itinerary thing.”

  “Flying home,” Dan said. “Remember?”

  “My class was going to the Pantheon today,” Kasper said. He pulled a folded piece of paper from his pocket and handed it to her.

  “Yes, I see.” Woody squinted at the page. “It’s in some other language. Danish, of course! But yes, I see it. Pantheon. If only Mrs. Johnson were here.”

  “Does she speak Danish?” Maia asked.

  “No. I mean, maybe. What I meant was, she knows everything about the Pantheon.”

  “We went there two days ago,” Maia explained to Sofie, who looked unimpressed.

  “Maybe we could go again, this afternoon,” said Woody, wriggling her toes. Laura had noticed that she always did this when she was excited or nervous. “But this morning I thought we might go to see something very special.”

  “The church with all the torture pictures in it?” asked Jack, bouncing on the spot. He’d been talking about this place ever since they’d arrived in Rome. It was some church up the hill behind the Colosseum, and each of its frescoes depicted one saint or another being tortured or put to death in a terrible way.

  “One of my favorite movies,” said a breathless Woody, ignoring Jack altogether, “is Roman Holiday. Have any of you seen it?”

  Laura nodded. She hated to have something in common with Woody, but Roman Holiday was one of her favorites as well—a black-and-white romantic movie with Audrey Hepburn, about a princess on vacation in Rome. She’d watched it with her mom years ago.

  Nobody else seemed to have heard of the movie.

  “Are we going to watch it?” Jack asked forlornly.

  “No, no!” Woody laughed, her toes squirming away in her grubby silver Birkenstocks. “I thought we’d go to see la Bocca della Verità—the Mouth of Truth. They go see it in the film. It’s an ancient Roman face: a bearded man. We put our hands in his mouth, and if we’re liars he’ll bite our hands off!”

  “You do know that it was a sewer cover, right?” Maia asked Woody, but the teacher was already scrutinizing her map, and announcing that it would only take them half an hour to walk there. When she pushed open the glass door, the smell of smoke wafted in from the alley.

  “Great,” muttered Dan, falling into step next to Laura. “First we trudge through the streets choking on volcanic ash, then we get to stick our hands down a sewer. We’ll all be hospitalized by this afternoon.”

  Laura didn’t reply. She had other things to obsess over right now. By the end of today, would her bag be jingling with miraculously multiplying star sapphires? Would she see more birds fall out of the sky, killed by stone arrows launched by statues? Really, sticking her hand into a mouth carved in a sewer cover—something thousands of tourists did every year—was the least of her worries today.

  “As for him,” Dan said in a low voice, jerking his head in Kasper’s direction, “he’s going to be trouble. He’s no friendly ghost, if you know what I’m saying.”

  Laura had no idea what Dan was saying. Kasper seemed much friendlier than Sofie, and much more sensible than Woody. She checked that every zip on her backpack was firmly closed, and then followed the others out into the warm, smoky street.

  * * *

  There was only a short line of people waiting outside the church where the Mouth of Truth was displayed. Probably because anyone sensible, Sofie announced, was either driving as fast as they could away from Rome or hiding inside their hotel room, waiting for the volcano to blow.

  “We’re fine here, really,” Kasper said, resting a reassuring hand on Sofie’s shoulder. She gave a pleased smirk. Laura wished that Morgan were here: She couldn’t exactly nudge Maia to point out something like that. Maia was busy, anyway, scribbling in her notebook, frowning with concentration. “There’s no way debris from the eruption could extend this far.”

  Dan nudged Laura.

  “Like he knows,” he whispered to her. “Like I’m going to listen to some Danish guy lecture us about … you know, science.”

  “Um, there are lots of famous Danish scientists,” said Laura. “Niels Bohr, for example. He won the Nobel Prize.”

  Dan gave her a long look. She bent her head, willing herself not to blush, and hoped that Kasper was right.

  The streets of Rome were still prett
y busy, after all; people still seemed to be going to work or going shopping. The early summer heat was just as stifling as it had been for the past few days. But the billowing gray cloud up in the sky looked ominous, the streets were sandy with ash, and the city smelled as though a forest fire were burning just beyond the hills. Every TV screen they spotted above the counters in cafés or in shop windows was tuned to twenty-four-hour coverage of the simmering volcano and its mighty ash cloud.

  Here in the portico of the church, some people in the line wore hospital masks. An overreaction, Laura thought, especially since they were all protected by the vaulted ceiling, the stone a soft pink in today’s hazy light. Birds—crows, pigeons, seagulls—swooped and cawed outside, kept at a distance by the railings guarding the portico and its treasures from the busy street.

  Against the wall stood a big stone disk, like a Stone Age wheel, mounted on the sliced-off stub of a column. Even here at the end of the line, Laura could glimpse the huge face carved into the stone. This was the Mouth of Truth. Laura didn’t need Maia to tell her it was a sewer cover: She knew that already. But she’d also read that Roman sewer covers like this often depicted the face of a woman, a river goddess. This face was a man’s, and it looked like the face of a giant, ready to bite.

  They edged closer, waiting their turn with all the other tourists eager to pose for a photo sticking their hands in the giant’s mouth. Laura glimpsed its eyes, deep holes bored into the stone. Ridges around the face revealed themselves as wild hair and a beard. Very sinister, Laura thought, shivering despite the warmth of the day. There was nothing but darkness visible in its eye sockets, flared nostrils, and gaping mouth.

  When their group reached the head of the line, Laura wondered if she should even bother getting her picture taken. It seemed kind of ridiculous, sticking a hand inside a stone mouth. Jack pretended that his hand had been grabbed, writhing and mugging in pretend pain. Woody shrieked with happy approval. Someone was entering into the spirit of things, Laura supposed.

  Sofie held her hand on the mouth’s lip with a weak, bored smile on her face.

  “After you,” said Dan mock-gallantly, waving Laura on. When she pulled her camera out of her backpack and handed it to him, he looked surprised. “Why not just use your phone?”

  If Laura’s father were here, he would have launched into his usual diatribe about picture quality: “Remember, your phone is not a real camera!” he’d shouted to Laura at the airport as she disappeared through passport control—but she wasn’t going to explain all that to Dan now.

  “Just take a picture, okay?” she asked him, and slung her pack over one shoulder. Woody stage-managed her position, insisting she stand behind the short velvet rope.

  There was a loud squawk and a whoosh of feathers: A hooded crow was battering at the railings outside, as though it was being attacked. Laura thought of the crow yesterday, at the cemetery, fighting with the seagull. Had she really seen the gull being shot from the sky? Maybe she just had too active an imagination—useful when she was looking at ruins, less useful when she thought she saw things that were scientific impossibilities.

  Laura rested her hand inside the stone mouth and managed something that probably looked like a grimace.

  “You know, you look much prettier when you smile,” Dan said, and though his voice was teasing, Laura felt her cheeks flush. Ignore him.

  “Turn to the left,” Woody ordered. “No, I mean right!”

  Laura twisted as instructed, her hand sliding farther along the cool stone of the mouth, and tried to ignore the bird’s wings beating against the railings; its squawk sounded like a scream.

  Then something grabbed her. For a second Laura thought it was one of the boys, playing a joke, but she could see both Dan and Jack, safely on the other side of the velvet rope, and Kasper as well, looming above them. Her whole group was there, talking or looking away. But something or someone had clutched her fingers and was dragging them into the Mouth of Truth.

  Laura couldn’t help it: she screamed, and her whole body jerked toward the stone face. It was almost as though she were being suctioned by a vacuum cleaner, or sucked up by a tornado. She pulled away as hard as she could, bashing her wrist against the stone lip, but she couldn’t break free from this enormous, angry force trying to gobble up her hand.

  “Very good,” Woody was saying, clapping with pleasure. Laura screamed again, with frustration and pain. Why was everyone just standing there? Dan had crouched to take a picture of her, and other people in the line, people she didn’t know, were pressing forward as well, cameras and phones in the air. They all thought she was acting.

  “Help me!” she managed to cry, wincing when her hand was tugged even deeper inside the chasm. Her arm flailed, skin bashing against stone. Why was no one helping her? Why was this happening? An intense pain shot up her arm, and she heard herself growling like an animal caught in a trap, desperate to pull herself free.

  Then someone’s arms were around her, wrenching her away from the Mouth of Truth. Whoever it was pulled so hard that Laura’s hand slipped free of the stone mouth and its terrible vortex, and they both staggered, knocking over the velvet rope. Laura collapsed to the ground, her knees too shaky to keep her up.

  Maia stepped away, picking up the bag Laura had dropped. So it was Maia, of all people, who’d come to her rescue.

  “Laura, I think you overdid it a little,” Woody chided.

  “I wasn’t acting!” Laura protested, blinking back tears. She sat up, cradling her bruised red wrist, trying not to hyperventilate. “Something grabbed me. I swear!”

  Everyone stood looking down at her. They all thought she was crazy, Laura could see. Only Maia looked worried.

  “Didn’t you hear her screaming?” Maia demanded, staring at Sofie. Laura couldn’t see the German girl’s face.

  “We thought she was just messing around,” said Jack. He seemed embarrassed by Laura’s tears, though he wasn’t half as embarrassed as Laura herself.

  For a moment the only sound was Dan picking up the security rope and setting it in place again, and the whispers of other people waiting in line. Laura’s wrist was throbbing and she felt like surrendering to her tears and out-and-out weeping. Instead she dusted herself off with her good hand and clambered to her feet, wishing that everyone would stop staring.

  “Well,” said Sofie, glaring in Woody’s direction. “It was not such a good idea to come here, was it? We should have gone to the Pantheon, as Kasper wanted.”

  She beamed at Kasper, and Laura couldn’t help notice Dan rolling his eyes.

  They stopped for lunch at a restaurant on Piazza della Madonna dei Monti, a small cobbled square with a fountain. They sat outside, under giant canvas umbrellas, half-hidden by a trellis. On another day, Laura would have stopped to take pictures of the lion heads on the fountain or the little balcony above the restaurant, with its faded wooden shutters and pots bright with flowers. But after the attack by the Mouth of Truth, she was eager to hide herself away in this cloistered café.

  While Woody—with help from Sofie, who seemed to speak passable Italian—ordered mozzarella and tomato salads and pizzas to share, Laura sat silently, nursing her sore wrist. The others, she noticed, chatted among themselves, and seemed to be leaving her alone. Maybe they were being tactful, seeing that she was still very shaken and upset. Or maybe they just thought she was an idiot. Laura wasn’t the kind of person who liked drawing attention to herself, in either good or bad ways, and this was definitely a bad way.

  The day felt swampy with heat, and the bare skin of Laura’s legs stuck to her chair. She could see a few people lolling on the fountain’s broad steps, and the usual pigeons pecking about. A sleek gray cat prowled just a few feet away, padding back and forth across the cobbles. Whenever a seagull tottered too close or a sparrow flew over in search of crumbs, the cat lunged, scattering the birds.

  “Looks like we’ve got a security guard,” Dan said to Jack. He must have been watching the cat as well. It
was strange, Laura thought, that a feral cat would be lurking just there. It wasn’t chasing the birds, exactly; it was just keeping them away. It had to be a coincidence, surely, that it was patrolling so close to Laura: She could have reached a hand through the glossy leaves twisting up the trellis and stroked its sleek back.

  Maybe Dan was right: It was guarding them. But guarding them from what? Seagulls and sparrows? She was being paranoid, Laura told herself. But what about the crow at the Mouth of Truth, who’d been beating against the railings, feathers flying, as though … as though it was trying to warn her? And wasn’t that exactly the same kind of gray-and-black crow she’d seen circling in the sky at the Protestant Cemetery, attacking the seagull?

  Another seagull swooped low across the cobbles, its wings almost brushing the ground. The gray cat arched its back and hissed, its body rigid with tension until the seagull flew away. When Laura picked up her water glass, she realized that her hand—her good hand—was shaking. Whatever was going on in Rome right now, she didn’t understand it, and she didn’t like it.

  She wished, for what felt like the hundredth time, that they’d been scheduled to fly out just one day earlier. They’d have missed the eruption and its ash cloud, and she would be safely home by now, downloading photos onto the family computer, handing around little presents, and eating her mom’s guacamole. Instead she was stuck in a place where creatures—and statues, and even ancient sewer covers—behaved in random, violent ways.

  After lunch they drifted through a maze of narrow streets, shadowy under the ash-heavy sky. Laura walked by herself, not even stopping to take pictures. Sofie was talking and flirting with Kasper, and Jack and Dan were deep in conversation about some action movie. Kasper was steering them in the direction of the Pantheon, followed by Maia. Woody, half in a daze, was the slowest walker of all.