The Eternal City

by Paula Morris

  “Come on,” said Kasper, putting an arm around her shoulder, steering her toward the entrance.

  Dan knocked on the heavy doors, which were locked: Jack had tried them, anxious to get in. They stood around waiting, nobody speaking. Maia leaned against a low wall to study her guidebook, while Sofie shook the ashy residue out of her hair. Kasper scuffed around in the gravel as though he were tapping around an imaginary soccer ball. The look on his face suggested he didn’t think they had much chance of admission.

  Laura didn’t feel very positive about it, either. Even the mighty Colosseum was closed today. Here on this quiet hill, Rome looked and felt like a ghost town.

  The silence was broken by the sound of a bolt clanking, and one of the big doors shuddered open. A dark-haired man in overalls—not a priest, but some kind of caretaker, Laura thought—blocked the doorway, frowning at them.

  “Buon giorno,” said Dan in slow, overloud Italian. “Sono studenti …”

  “Sí, sí,” said the man, beckoning them in with an impatient flick of the hand, as though he didn’t need to hear anymore. He held the door open for them as they all filed in, and then closed it again, presumably to deter any other unwanted visitors.

  The caretaker scuttled away like an insect, leaving them alone in the empty, silent church.

  “See?” Jack said proudly. “I told you it would be awesome.”

  Really, Laura thought, it was unlike any of the other churches they’d visited. The space felt like a temple, with giant ivory columns around a circular altar.

  There were no stained-glass windows, or statues looming over votive candles, or painted ceilings showing cherubs cavorting. The windows were tiny, like portholes; and the floors and walls were the same chalky bone color as the columns. It was such a calm place, silent apart from their footsteps echoing on the marble floor.

  The only decoration was around the lower wall: faded frescoes painted in the sixteenth century, according to Maia. The frescoes, Laura knew, were what Jack had wanted to see. Each panel depicted a scene of torture—some early Christian martyr meeting a horrible fate. Jack had warned them, his voice crackling with glee, that the frescoes would be gory, but Laura hadn’t realized quite how brutal they’d be. She’d seen paintings of saints meeting their deaths before—Saint Catherine against a wheel, or Saint Sebastian pierced with arrows—but these were always so stylized that the saint in question looked serene and otherworldly, rather than suffering agonizing pain.

  These frescoes—“thirty-four,” Maia reported, turning the page in her book—were another thing altogether. One panel showed remarkably calm Christians lining up on the left to get their hands sliced off, and on the right to have their tongues torn out. In one fresco, a person was gored by a bull; others waited to get torn to pieces in the ring by a lion. A woman was boiled alive in a cauldron, only her head visible above the seething water. In one panel, a whole ship of martyrs was set alight, and others lay strewn bleeding in the foreground, crushed to death by huge boulders. Others were flung from windows or were in the process of being buried alive.

  Laura wandered past scene after nasty scene of torture, flinching at each new atrocity. Maia and the boys were on the far side of the church, Jack taking pictures while Maia and Dan and Kasper leaned over a hole in the ground that revealed, according to the snatches of their jabber that Laura could make out, chunks of the church’s fifth-century floor.

  Something about the goriness of the scenes encircling them made Laura reluctant to stand alone. She walked up to Sofie, who was examining another fresco closely, her nose practically pressed to the plaster. In the picture, a man in a golden tunic ran a sword through a woman’s neck, while she stood clasping her hands together in prayer. Bodies hung in various tortured states from trees in the background, and another woman sat half buried in a pit of quicksand, snakes slithering all around her.

  “Which saints are these?” Laura asked Sofie, peering at the Latin plaque. Before she could try to make sense of it, Laura was distracted by one of the snakes on the wall.

  It was moving.

  Really and truly, she told herself, it was moving: She could see it rolling out of the water and onto the faded painted grass near the bottom of the picture. Laura blinked and stared, and blinked again. All the fresco’s snakes were moving now, slithering onto rocks and over painted grass—straight toward Sofie’s face.

  Laura reached for Sofie and grabbed her by the elbow. The other girl gasped, maybe because Laura had grabbed her so roughly, but—more likely—because the man in the golden tunic had dropped his sword.

  He stared straight at them, his face still a red-cheeked, emotionless blank. Sofie’s gasp meant she must be able to see it, too, and in that instant Laura felt a rush of relief and exhilaration: This was really happening! It wasn’t just her imagination!

  Sofie let out a strangled scream and jerked toward the fresco; Laura couldn’t keep a grip on her elbow. The man in the tunic—this painted man, this unreal thing—had placed his hands around Sofie’s neck.

  He was pulling her headfirst into the fresco.

  Laura could see a two-part Sofie now—her torso and legs and feet still in the church, and her head and shoulders in the grip of the painted man, already part of the fresco’s grisly scene. Sofie’s face was twisted sideways; she looked absolutely terrified. But her screams must have been swallowed by the fresco, because she wasn’t making a sound.

  Laura threw her bag on the floor and grabbed Sofie’s waist. She wrapped her arms as tightly as she could around the girl’s narrow frame and pulled. But her first tug seemed to make no impact at all. Just like yesterday at the Mouth of Truth, the unknown force sucking Sofie into the wall was too powerful. Laura dropped down onto her haunches and tugged again, bracing herself for Sofie’s weight when she toppled free of the fresco.

  But Sofie didn’t topple. The man in the fresco was too strong. All Laura could see of him now was one brutish leg, calf muscle bulging, snakes crawling over his sandals. Their tongues flickered at Sofie’s pale arms.

  “Help!” Laura heard herself squeak. She tugged again, groaning with the exertion, but Sofie seemed to be slipping farther into the picture, the painted snakes leaping to greet her.

  Someone was next to Laura now; another pair of arms wrapped themselves around Sofie. Laura glanced up and saw Maia’s prim dark head, bent over Sofie’s back.

  “One, two, three,” Maia chanted. “Pull!”

  They pulled together, grunting with the effort of it, and for a moment Laura thought they’d succeeded: Sofie took a small step back. But the man in the fresco wasn’t beaten yet. Sofie lurched forward again, and Laura felt her grip slipping.

  “I can’t hold her,” she said through gritted teeth.

  “Hey!” Maia shouted. “Help us!”

  Thank goodness for Maia, Laura thought, readjusting her sweaty grip and hanging on grimly. Yesterday she was the one who saved Laura, and today she was springing to the rescue again. Where were all those stupid boys when they needed them?

  Laura rested her head on Sofie’s lower back, which was warm with perspiration. She yanked again as hard as she could, but all her efforts seemed pathetic; even with Maia’s help, Sofie still seemed stuck fast to the wall, jerking out of their grasp. Laura lost her footing and almost fell, her legs aching from crouching.

  The only thing Laura could hear clearly was the thud of her own heart, but she sensed the pounding of footsteps and felt a change in the air, a whir of another person moving close by. A glimpse of bright green, inches away from her face: Kasper.

  In that instant there was a hard thwack and a high-pitched squeal; Sofie staggered backward, with Maia and Laura still attached. Laura fell to the floor, the marble cool and hard beneath her back, Sofie sprawled across her legs. Maia sat slumped nearby, her shoulders rising and falling as she tried to catch her breath.

  High above them, Kasper towered like some kind of Norse god, grimacing and rubbing the knuckles of his right hand.

>   “You punched it?” Laura asked him. He nodded, but he looked bemused, as though what had happened made no sense at all. Which, of course, it didn’t.

  When she got her breath back, Laura propped herself up on her elbows and stared up at the fresco. The man in the golden tunic was back in position, his sword poised at the neck of the saint, but the snakes were still slithering their way back into the pond. Then they froze—just painted things again, not real creatures.

  Dan and Jack raced over, and Dan hauled Laura to her feet.

  “You okay?” he asked her, and she nodded. He shot a disbelieving look at Kasper. “Did you seriously punch the wall?”

  “I was punching the man,” Kasper said in an even tone, as though it was an everyday occurrence for him to punch people and save the day, even if that person was a painted figure in a Renaissance fresco. He’d stopped rubbing his knuckles now, and everyone could see his raw red skin.

  “The man?” Jack asked.

  “The one who grabbed Sofie,” Kasper replied.

  Dan let out a huff. “Why do you girls keep making up crazy stuff?”

  Laura felt a surge of anger that took over the usual shyness she felt around Dan. “We’re not making anything up,” she hissed. She knew what she’d seen; she glanced at Sofie, Maia, and Kasper. They knew, too. Sofie was sniffing loudly and rubbing her neck with trembling hands. She looked pale and shaken when Kasper helped her to her feet.

  “Trust me,” Dan muttered to Laura. “She saw your stunt yesterday at the Mouth of Truth and decided to copy it.”

  Laura glared at Dan.

  “Please shut up,” she said. A day ago, she’d never have guessed she could snap like that at Dan Sinclair. But a lot had changed. Dan looked offended and backed away. Whatever, Laura thought.

  “Did you see the snakes moving?” she asked Maia. “In the fresco, I mean?”

  “No,” Maia replied. “I couldn’t see anything but Sofie’s back.”

  “I don’t understand.” Jack was talking, pacing up and down in front of the now-still fresco. “What happened, exactly?”

  Sofie turned her face to answer him, her eyes blazing. “I was looking at that,” she explained, jabbing an accusing finger at the fresco. “Then something grabbed me, around the neck.”

  She stroked her throat, and Laura could quite clearly see the red marks, large and angry. The man in the tunic had tried to throttle her. Not even skeptical Dan could doubt the evidence.

  “Something where?” Dan asked.

  “Not something,” Sofie corrected herself. “Someone. That man!”

  “The caretaker guy? He came up behind you?”

  “No,” Sofie snapped. “The man in the picture!”

  Jack and Dan exchanged a look.

  “She’s not lying,” Laura barked at them. “She was being … she was being dragged into the picture!”

  “It certainly looked that way,” Maia said, who seemed completely unflustered by everything going on. “He grabbed her and was pulling her in. And it was taking us a while to try pulling her out.”

  Maia was acting as though they had everything under control, but Laura didn’t think that was true at all.

  “And then, luckily, Kasper arrived,” Laura said, knowing how much any talk of Kasper’s intervention would irritate Dan. “And he actually did something.”

  “He punched the wall,” Dan said dryly.

  “But not the caretaker dude?” Jack was persisting with this theory.

  “That man … there.” Kasper pointed at the fresco, but in a halfhearted way. He didn’t look very sure about what he’d done, or to whom. “I think, anyway.”

  “So you’re saying this guy, who’s made out of paint and plaster and other inanimate … I don’t know, stuff,” said Dan, hands on hips, “attacked Sofie? And then you punched him and he let her go.”

  “That’s exactly what happened,” said Laura, enraged by Dan’s attitude. “Are you calling us all liars?”

  “I’m not saying you’re lying. Seeing things, maybe.”

  “Laura saw snakes moving,” Maia added, unhelpfully. “In the fresco.”

  “Snakes moving? In the fresco?” Dan smirked again. “Maybe she’s inhaled too much ash.”

  “How dare you?” Laura felt the burn of her cheeks. It was bad enough that all these odd and violent things were happening, but it was even worse to feel disbelieved. Again, Dan fell silent. Laura got the sense that maybe he was starting to feel bad. Well, good.

  “What was it like?” Kasper asked Sofie. “Inside the wall?”

  Sofie took a deep breath before answering. “The wall was not there,” she said, clearly struggling to steady her voice. She seemed mad rather than scared. “I could not feel it. There was just pulling at my head, and then pulling at my legs.”

  “Like I said—that was us,” Maia told the boys. “Laura and me. We were trying to pull you back.”

  “Thank you,” Sofie said quietly, looking down at the floor. “In front of me there was just …”

  “Air?” suggested Kasper, and Sofie nodded.

  “Genau,” she said. Laura had heard her say that word a few times, and she wasn’t sure what it meant—something like “for real” or “sure,” she thought.

  “When I punched the man,” Kasper said, and Laura couldn’t resist looking pointedly at Dan to see the sour expression on his face, “it felt like a man for just one moment. And then it felt like the wall!”

  He laughed, and Sofie smiled at him. As though he’d done all the work of saving her, Laura thought, annoyed.

  “But think about it,” Dan said, trying to be in charge again. “Yesterday something tries to suck Laura’s hand into the Mouth of Truth. I mean, at the time, we all thought she was messing around, right?”

  Nobody said anything, and Laura was grateful. She could feel her face getting red again.

  “Then today, something tries to grab Sofie. In both cases, it’s like some inanimate object—a piece of stone yesterday, and today a wall. Why is this happening? It can’t have anything to do with the ash cloud.”

  “And Laura got rid of the bad-luck charm,” said Jack.

  Everyone turned to look at him.

  “What are you talking about?” Dan asked.

  “You know. Laura had this charm, and we thought it might be bringing her bad luck. It just appeared in her bag—you tell them!” He gestured at Laura.

  “He means the star sapphire,” Maia said, her voice and expression neutral.

  “It was a sapphire?” Kasper asked.

  “It’s just a stone,” said Laura, embarrassed by the attention. “Nothing super-valuable. I have one in my bracelet I can show you. Anyway, this other stone appeared in my bag, and I don’t know how it got there.”

  As soon as she said this, a memory flickered: the Protestant Cemetery, the crow circling in the sky. Something in the crow’s beak falling, falling, falling … Could it have been the stone, falling into Laura’s bag?

  “So I told Laura,” Jack continued, impatient with her abrupt silence, “that she should just get rid of it. And we did, walking back from the Pantheon. Dropped it into a drain. Washed it away.”

  “I told them no, but they would not listen,” said Sofie.

  “A sapphire?” Kasper asked again.

  Laura unzipped her bag and felt in the inner pocket for her broken bracelet.

  “Here,” she said, holding it up to him. “This is what it looks like. Though the other stone was more green than this one.”

  Kasper dangled the bracelet’s broken chain, and the star sapphire swung in the air. In the dim light of the church it looked gray and dull, like a pebble picked up at the beach and never quite as shiny or precious once you got it home.

  “I remember you wearing that,” Dan said to Laura, his voice low. “You wear it every day. When did it break?”

  “The other day …” Laura began, but stopped midsentence. Maia was muttering something to Sofie, and Sofie scrabbled around in her own bag, a smal
l messenger-style bag she always wore across her body. She held something up, pinched between her thumb and forefinger, for them all to see.

  It was the other star sapphire, the one with the grayish-green tinge, the one that Laura and Jack had dropped down the drain yesterday, never expecting to see it again.

  Sofie had found the star sapphire early that morning, she told them, on the windowsill of their room in the hostel. She’d opened the window and picked it up, she said, because it was pretty.

  Laura’s heart was pounding. It hadn’t been a dream after all; last night there really had been a hooded crow out there on the ledge, tapping on the window, leaving her a gift she didn’t want. Jack was right to call it a bad-luck charm. Look what had just happened to Sofie!

  “That’s the same one,” Maia declared, though she didn’t bother to go over to get a closer look, as the others were doing. Laura pulled her bracelet out and lay it on the ground, next to Sofie’s stone.

  “They are like a pair of eyes,” Kasper observed. “The color a little different, maybe, but still a pair.”

  “We threw it down a drain!” Jack was still protesting. “I saw it fall into the water!”

  “And now it is back,” said Kasper, staring down at the two stones. “When Laura has it, the Mouth of Truth grabs her. When Sofie has it, the painted wall grabs her. And if we throw it away, it comes back?”

  This was more of a question than a statement. He looked at Laura, as though she could give him an answer.

  “It seems that way,” she said.

  “Or,” said Dan, “we could just leave it here and go. If any of us see it again, we ignore it. If it turns up on our windowsill, we ignore it. If it turns up in someone’s bag, we throw it away. Agreed?”

  Maia shook her head.

  “I don’t think it’s as simple as that,” she told Dan, and Laura’s stomach sank.

  Kasper handed her bracelet back and she clutched it, comforted by the ridges of the chain digging into her clammy palms.

  “We’re not in our usual world here,” Maia said slowly, and Jack laughed.