The Eternal City

by Paula Morris

“What?” Jack called. Laura moved out of the street, to stand by a grand double doorway, its green paint peeling, with a brass lion’s head as a door knocker. Jack joined her on the stone step. Sofie sashayed toward them, frowning.

  “Look, I’ll show you,” said Laura. She unzipped her bag and fumbled around for the loose stone. It was dry now, every golden vein perfectly clear. Maia was right: It had a greener tinge than the one in her bracelet, which was a soft gray-blue color.

  Jack held the stone gingerly between his thumb and forefinger, peering at it with one eye closed like an expert jeweler.

  “Where’d you get it?” he asked.

  “I have no idea,” Laura told him, looking up at the narrow band of dark sky visible between the town houses lining the street. Perhaps she was paranoid, but she could hear more seagulls now, loud and menacing, squawking to one another across the rooftops. “I found it in my bag last night. I don’t know how it got there.”

  “You must put it away,” Sofie told her. “Maybe someone steals it if you wave it around.”

  “I don’t care,” said Laura. “It’s not mine anyway, is it?”

  “Maybe it’s bringing you bad luck.” Jack handed the stone back to her. “I mean, first you have that thing happen at the Mouth of Truth. Then a bird totally attacks you when you take it out of your bag. Then you fall down inside the Pantheon. Maybe you should get rid of it.”

  That was the most sensible thing Jack had said this whole trip. Why was she carrying the new stone around? Just because it was a match for the one on her bracelet? She didn’t even know how it had found its way into her bag in the first place. If the seagulls wanted it so badly, let the seagulls have it.

  “Should I go back to the Pantheon and throw it in the fountain?” she asked. It was just as well that Morgan wasn’t here, she thought: she would go nuts if she heard Laura asking Jack, of all people, for advice.

  “No,” Sofie said firmly. “We must go to the hostel now.”

  “And you didn’t find it at the Pantheon, did you?” asked Jack, and Laura shook her head. “So why not just drop it anywhere? Look.”

  He pointed at the iron grating of a drain, set into the sloping gutter just inches from their feet.

  Laura squeezed the stone in her fist. True, strange things had happened before she found the stone in her bag, but none of them had involved physical harm until today. Jack leaned over the grate, gazing in; Laura followed his lead.

  “This is a stupid idea,” Sofie was saying, but Laura ignored her. The world below the grate was as dark as the sky, and she could hear water gushing. Once she dropped the stone through the iron bars, the water would carry it away into the sewers, never to be seen again. Not even the seagulls would be able to grab it down there.

  She crouched low over the grate and opened her fist. The stone dropped, bouncing on the grate and skittering into the fast-moving water below. Gone forever, she thought, taking its mystery and bad luck with it.

  * * *

  That night, Laura woke up more than once, wriggling in the confines of her bunk bed. The mattress was thin, the pillow was a floppy square, and she couldn’t find a comfortable way to sleep. Her knee ached from smacking against the floor of the Pantheon. Her left wrist was still throbbing, and dousing the peck mark on her right hand with antiseptic lotion earlier hadn’t taken away the pain.

  Sofie and Maia were fast asleep, and the only sound Laura could hear, aside from their breathing, was the occasional patter of rain against the window.

  The third time she woke it was almost six in the morning, according to her phone—which she held under the covers so the light didn’t wake the others, wishing that it was useful for more than just checking the time. But every text she tried to send home just sat on her screen with a red exclamation mark, refusing to be sent.

  No sun peeped through the crack between the orange curtains. It was going to be another day of ash-cloud gray.

  Laura thought back to the night before, when the group had all congregated in the hostel’s overlit lobby.

  “Tomorrow we must do what my friend Jack wants,” Kasper had declared, sprawled in one of the lobby’s squeaking plastic chairs. “We must go the church with all the pictures of torture.”

  Sofie and Maia had been sitting in the corner, having some kind of whispered squabble. Dan and Jack were watching the lobby TV: The news was about the ash cloud, of course. Sofie had dragged her chair away from Maia, and sat pouting until she was distracted by Kasper taking off his sweatshirt and pulling up his T-shirt in the process, revealing a taut stretch of tanned skin.

  Laura folded her pancake pillow in half and rammed it under her neck. She had to try to get some more sleep. No one else would be awake for hours, especially as they’d all stayed up late playing cards. Even Maia had joined in, after Kasper talked her into it, though she claimed to have never played a single card game in her entire life, and insisted on calling the Joker the “Wizard.”

  Something was tapping at the window. More rain, Laura thought, snuggling down under her comforter. Maybe even hail this time, because the sound was much sharper: tap, tap, tap against the glass. It wasn’t hail, she decided, and it didn’t really sound like the dull plop of water dripping onto the windowsill. Even when she pulled the comforter over her head, Laura could still hear it, annoying and persistent. Tap, tap, tap. Tap, tap, tap. She was never going to get back to sleep, not with this endless tapping.

  Laura eased out of bed and crept to the window across the cold linoleum floor. Opening one of the curtains without making a noise wouldn’t be easy—they tended to screech and stick on their plastic rails—so Laura lifted one and ducked her head beneath.

  She was face-to-face with a hooded crow, perched outside on the windowsill and tapping the glass with its beak. Tapping what now seemed like a message, a strange Morse code. Laura gasped, transfixed by the tiny black eyes searing straight into her. Then the crow took off, a blur of gray and black rising into the dull sky.

  Laura clutched at the wall with shaking hands, trying to steady her breathing. The crow was gone, but something else lay on the ledge where it had perched.

  It was the star sapphire, the one she’d dropped into the drain. The one she thought she’d never see again after it was sucked into the city’s murky bowels. Laura’s whole body felt shivery with the shock of recognition, and with an ice-cold fear.

  She stepped away from the window, the curtains falling back into place. She climbed into bed, pulled the comforter over her head, and buried her face in the pillow. There was no way she was opening that window, no way she was retrieving that star sapphire from the ledge. Maybe this whole thing was a dream—a nightmare—and when she woke, the sun would be shining, and the stone would be gone.

  Only half of Laura’s wish came true. When she woke again, Sofie calling to her that the shower down the hallway was free, the curtains were open. The sun was still obscured by the ash cloud, but the star sapphire was nowhere to be seen.

  It had been a dream, Laura told herself, so relieved that she felt like laughing out loud.

  The shower was as lukewarm as usual, but Laura didn’t mind. Even her various injuries seemed better today. Maybe Jack was right: The strange stone had brought her bad luck. Well, she was rid of it now. Hopefully it had sunk to the bottom of the sewer’s murky depths, and she would stop having nightmares about it reappearing on the window ledge, accompanied by an insistent, beady-eyed crow.

  Back in her room, Maia was standing by the window combing her wet hair, dressed in crisp blue shorts and a clean white T-shirt. Laura didn’t know how Maia kept coming up with clean clothes. There wasn’t a clean or non-creased thing left in Laura’s bag. She’d expected to be home by now, dumping everything into the big washing machine in the basement, not recycling the same denim shorts and ratty gray T-shirt or surreptitiously washing underwear in the hostel bathroom.

  Laura’s stomach twisted with homesickness, thinking of the cool, musty basement at home, the wicker basket
balanced on the washing machine’s lid. Back in Bloomington, she’d been longing for adventure, for exotic and distant sights. Everything back in their leafy suburb seemed so ordinary, so overfamiliar. Now she’d be quite happy to return to the most mundane parts of her daily life, especially if they came with clean clothes and a room to herself.

  “So,” said Maia, as though they’d been having a conversation, “there’s a problem with the Internet now, not just cell phones. Our parents know we’re okay, but we can’t send any messages to them today.”

  “How do you know all this?” Laura asked.

  “The woman at the desk told me. Mrs. Johnson was down there at some point. She left some money for us to buy lunch with. A doctor came yesterday, but everyone else is still sick.”

  “Why aren’t we sick?” Laura asked, but Maia didn’t reply; she just packed her comb away. “And how can the ash cloud possibly cause a problem with the Internet?”

  “I don’t know.” Maia looked uninterested. “There are pastries and coffee in the lobby this morning, by the way. The new woman organized it.”

  “What happened to Agent Orange?”

  “He left the city,” Maia said.

  “Overnight? But he was there when we went to bed!”

  “That’s what the woman at the desk told me.”

  Laura was curious to meet this new font of wisdom sitting in the hostel’s lobby, the provider of actual food and actual information—unlike her orange-skinned predecessor.

  * * *

  The new receptionist was young, smiling and pretty, with long wavy dark hair, dressed in a white sundress that looked immaculately clean. When Laura clattered down the stairs into the lobby, the woman was drawing a walking route onto Dan’s street map and pointing out the best way to get to the church.

  “I was just about to grab you something to eat,” Dan said over his shoulder to Laura, leaning one elbow on the reception desk. He’d turned up the collar of his blue polo shirt, which looked ridiculous, in Laura’s opinion, but maybe he thought it would impress the receptionist. The counter was high enough to hide the shirt’s tomato sauce stain from yesterday’s lunch.

  “There is no need,” Kasper called. He stood by a folding table set up against one wall, holding a paper plate aloft. “I have food here.”

  Dan narrowed his eyes and glared down at the map, as though Kasper hadn’t even spoken.

  “Here,” Kasper said, handing Laura two small croissants doused in powdered sugar. He flashed her his dazzling smile. He was wearing a faded gray T-shirt with the word NORSE printed on it in giant white letters, and bright-green shorts. His legs were incredibly long and tanned, silky with golden hair. In addition to his necklace, he now wore three bracelets, woven from multicolored threads, strung around his wrist.

  “I like those,” she told him, and he said he’d gotten them in Peru, when his family went there on a trek. Poor Dan, Laura thought; there was no way he could appear as effortlessly cool and cosmopolitan as Kasper. In his polo shirt and khaki shorts, Dan looked more like a golf caddy.

  “Is Peru where you got your pendant as well?” she asked him.

  “This?” Kasper fingered it. “No. This is amber. My father gave it to me. He found it when he was a child—in a bog, I think you would call it. Near the place his grandparents lived in Norway, where he went every summer. See, it’s in the shape of an animal. It may be quite old. I don’t know much about it.”

  Laura leaned forward to look more closely. Kasper was right: It did look like an animal, with short legs and an elongated head. The amber was scratched, as though someone had etched in a pattern.

  “What are they saying now?” Jack called. The others were gathered around the TV, munching their pastries and trying to decipher the Italian news coverage of the volcanic eruption. They’d learned yesterday that Kasper and Sofie both understood a little Italian.

  “I think,” said Kasper, squinting at the TV, “it says that we will not die. But nobody can fly anywhere in southern Europe and northern Africa. And maybe it spreads farther north now. Also, strange things are happening. Maybe small earthquakes?”

  “Yes,” Sofie agreed. “Earthquakes, which means the Metro does not run. And there is something about the cloud now—it is very low.”

  “What about the Internet and cell phones not working?” Laura asked Kasper.

  He shook his head. “Nobody says anything about that. Maybe it is just this hostel.” His look said that anything was possible in a dump like this.

  “We can look for an Internet café when we’re out,” Laura suggested. She was hoping to email her parents to check in.

  “Church first!” protested Jack through a mouthful of food, and Kasper laughed, clapping Jack on the shoulder.

  Laura sighed. She wished she could tell someone about seeing maybe-Mercury yesterday. But she didn’t think any of them would believe her. She wasn’t even sure if she believed herself anymore. Hopefully nothing quite so bizarre would happen today.

  * * *

  The sky was low, its obscuring cloud darker and angrier than the day before. The smell of smoke in the air was intense. A grittiness settled on Laura’s skin and in her throat. She wondered if this was what it felt like in the Sahara desert: hot and windy, with sand stinging your eyes.

  The walk to “Jack’s church” was long and sticky, and the streets seemed much quieter than the day before—less traffic, fewer people, and more shops with their railings resolutely closed. Police sirens screeched in the distance. On one street Laura saw an old woman pull her laundry in—it had been flapping on a pole high in the air—and bang the wooden shutters closed.

  Everywhere she looked, in fact, it seemed shutters were clattering and windows were slamming; people were carrying in signs and even potted plants. When Laura and the others passed a small supermarket, a man was staggering through the sliding doors, knees buckled with the weight of two plastic-wrapped crates of bottled water. In the same street, an aproned woman posted a sign in a bakery’s window—Tutto esaurito—and hurried to close the door. Everything sold out, Laura realized: That’s what the sign meant.

  “Do people know something we don’t?” she asked Dan, wondering if they should be buying supplies of bread and water, and hunkering down in the hostel.

  “Not sure,” he said in a low voice. “It feels weird today. Maybe because the cloud is so low …”

  A seagull strutted a little way ahead; two more pecked at a split bag of trash. The sharp sound of their caws so unnerved Laura that she instinctively stepped closer to Dan, almost colliding with him.

  “It’s okay,” he said, placing a steadying hand on her back. Laura was mortified: He thought she was snuggling up to him like a scared child! And even worse—maybe she was. “We’ll be fine inside the church.”

  “What if it’s closed?” Laura asked. They’d passed three churches already—this was Rome, after all, where there seemed to be an ornate church on every street—and they’d all appeared closed, heavy doors bolted.

  “Serena called to check, and they’re staying open just for us,” said Dan.

  “Who’s Serena?”

  “The new girl at the hostel.”

  “But I thought the phone there wasn’t working.” Laura was puzzled. “Or the Internet. And cell phones aren’t working anywhere, are they?”

  Dan shrugged.

  “She told me she’d called them and everything was fine. We just have to knock on the door, and someone will be there to let us in.”

  “Wow,” said Laura, not sure whether to believe him. Serena may have managed to conjure up some breakfast for them, but could she make a closed church open?

  “I guess she knows the priest or something,” Dan said, but Laura was distracted. A hooded crow was swooping from one side of the street to the other, lacing its way up the Via Cavour ahead of them. For the first time today, Laura felt shivery, cold in her flimsy T-shirt and shorts. The crow tapping on her window last night—that was just a dream, she told herself.r />
  But the seagull Laura had seen shot from the sky: that wasn’t a dream. The wing-heeled boy she saw swirling down the Pantheon’s funnel of rain: that wasn’t a dream. But was it real, exactly? Ever since the morning she’d seen—or thought she’d seen—the stone snake at the Trevi Fountain writhing, the city had become a surreal place for Laura, a disturbing, disorienting wonderland.

  “He really thinks he’s all that,” Dan was saying, and Laura didn’t understand: Had he seen the Mercury boy as well? It took her a moment to realize that he was nodding in Kasper’s direction, the expression on his face almost comically sour. Kasper was walking ahead, with Sofie and Jack, and they were laughing at something he’d just said.

  “He’s really getting on my nerves,” Dan muttered. “Can’t he, like, get a train back to Denmark? I mean, I swear to you he’s at least twenty years old. No way is he still in high school.”

  “Maybe he’s just tall,” said Laura, because she couldn’t think of anything else to say. If this were really a dream, surely Dan wouldn’t be complaining about Kasper? She wouldn’t be able to feel ash flakes brushing her face, or taste them when she spoke.

  They turned up Caelian Hill, following the road that led up from the vast stone skeleton of the Colosseum into a quiet neighborhood of big houses and gardens. Laura’s footsteps felt heavy, as though she were slogging through water.

  The church that Jack was obsessed with was called Santo Stefano Rotondo, and as soon as they reached it, Laura understood the Rotondo part. Within the jumble of apricot-colored shapes that made up the church lay the oldest part of the building, round like a temple. The church was surrounded by towering pines and what might usually be a pretty garden. Today the flower beds were cobwebbed with ash, litter blowing around like tumbleweeds. Nobody else was in sight.

  Laura passed a tree and did a double take. A long line of hooded crows were perched on a low-lying branch, squawking in agitation. She stood watching them, her bag clutched to her heart, expecting them to fly away at any moment. But the birds just fidgeted and kept squawking, as though they were quarreling.