Mrs. Stoppini opened the kitchen door to us and I saw my second strained smile of the day. Her haggard features and more-than-customarily pale skin suggested that she had had a rough night.
“Good morning, Miss Skye, Mr. Havelock. You’ll take tea before you begin your day’s work.”
The kitchen was warm and fragrant, a welcome contrast to the outside. I smelled biscuits baking in the oven and there was a stockpot on the stove giving off a savoury aroma. A cup of tea around the kitchen table sounded good to me. Before long Raphaella and I were spreading butter on hot steaming biscuits and sipping strong tea.
“How are you feeling today, Mrs. Stoppini?” I enquired.
The protruding eyes widened. Her teacup clunked into its saucer. “Why do you ask?”
Raphaella’s hand on my knee under the table stopped me from answering.
“It’s just that you look a little tired,” she replied for me. “It must be difficult at times, running a big house like this alone.”
“To tell the truth, Miss Skye, my sleep has not been very restful of late,” she said, dropping her eyes as if she’d just confessed to a crime.
“This weather…” Raphaella suggested.
But our hostess sidestepped the invitation to explain further.
“Indeed” was all she said.
We ate and sipped in silence for a little while, then I got to my feet. “Well, hi-ho, hi-ho,” I said.
“It’s off to work we go,” Raphaella finished.
Mrs. Stoppini looked confused. We collected our packs, thanked Mrs. Stoppini for the tea, and headed for the library. As soon as we turned into the hallway, Raphaella stopped in her tracks. She looked at me, an unasked question in her wide eyes. I nodded. I had felt it, too. As if the atmospheric pressure had suddenly dropped, the air felt heavy and menacing. Raphaella’s shoulders tightened as we pressed forward, side by side, the floor creaking under our reluctant feet. We stopped at the pocket doors. The odour of smoke was powerful and repellent.
“He’s in there now,” Raphaella murmured, wrapping her hand around her ankh.
My heart drumming, I placed my hands on the brass lion’s heads, then hesitated for a moment before opening the doors. In a way, I was relieved. Everything Raphaella and I had experienced since I first set foot in the Corbizzi mansion pointed to a confrontation between me and the spectre of the man who had invaded my dreams like a virus, infected my waking life and then spread to Raphaella’s. I had known this moment would come, and now it was here.
I felt Raphaella’s hand on my shoulder. I rolled the doors aside.
I may have thought I was ready for a showdown, but nothing could have prepared me for what was waiting on the far side of the room.
Covered from head to foot in a tattered black robe whose hood kept his face in shadow, Girolamo Savonarola stood before the alcove, his attention fixed ahead of him. He was as unsubstantial as a shade, but he gave off a frightening aura of willpower, malevolence, and dark purpose made even stronger by the nauseating stench of scorched wood, singed cloth, and decayed flesh.
I closed the doors firmly behind us without taking my eyes off the creature across the room. When the doors thumped together, the monk in black turned slowly in our direction.
How can I describe the indescribable? The pitiful, horrifying face framed by the heavy black wool of the hood. The hawkish nose protruding like a blade between eyes swollen and bulging, each pupil a black marble in the centre of an ash-coloured egg. The charred skin of his cheeks and forehead, seamed with cracks, blistered and withered. The fractured yellow teeth showing where the flesh of his lips had burned away.
He fixed his grotesque bloated eyes on us and raised his arms like a dark angel, the crisped skin of his skeletal hands and forearms cratered and ravaged by fire, exposing charred bones. His hideous mouth opened in a prolonged, silent howl more terrifying than any noise.
Raphaella and I shrank back. I felt the door against my shoulders, heard Raphaella’s rapid gasps and my heart battering my rib cage, fought the urge to fling the doors open and run.
I realized we were seeing him as he was the moment he died, choking and gagging as he twisted at the end of the hangman’s rope, his windpipe smashed closed, his feet and lower legs already beginning to burn. But he wore the white tunic and black cape of the Dominicans’ daily life. The power of his presence was like rocks piled on my chest. Now I understood the spell he had been able to cast over his audiences in church and cathedral. He stood with his arms raised in command, as if delivering one of his prophesies.
He had sent those he called sinners to the torture chamber or the fire. What would he do to us?
“Don’t take your eyes off him,” Raphaella whispered, her voice shaking. “Don’t back down.”
His attention bored into her, the freakish eyes radiating hostility as they focused on the ankh around her neck. It wasn’t until then I realized that to him she was an unbeliever and no better than an adulteress. Like Mrs. Stoppini, she was not married to the man she loved and shared her life with. They were women he would have had publicly thrashed, or worse.
I stepped toward him, arms chest high, palms facing him.
“Stay away,” I said, my mouth dry with fear. “Leave us!”
Savonarola stopped. He lowered his arms. Then he began to… dissolve, like salt in warm water, into the air around him.
And he was gone.
II
MY KNEES WERE SHAKING so badly I dropped into the nearest chair, certain that the spectre had disappeared but not left. Raphaella did the same. I looked over at her. Her eyebrows rose and fell in silent comment.
“You don’t look so hot,” she said.
“Bad choice of words.”
She giggled, releasing pent-up tension, and I laughed with her. I went over to the windows, winding the casements open as far as possible to ease the overpowering stench. Then I crossed the room toward the escritoire. As I passed her chair, Raphaella grabbed my hand, pressed it to her cheek, let go again. I bent over and kissed her on the mouth.
“Hey, admit it. I really know how to show a girl a good time,” I joked.
She smiled. “Were you as scared as I was?”
“More. But it was too easy, wasn’t it? I told him to go and he went.”
Still trembling, I dug the keys from their hiding place and went through the elaborate process of getting into the secret cupboard. The objects-which I was beginning to consider a curse-seemed in place and intact. I hauled them out onto the table.
Raphaella came to stand beside me. “One of these is the reason he’s haunting this house,” she said.
She took the medal out of the box, held it on its edge against the tabletop, and flicked it. It spun for a moment, wobbled, and quivered to a stop. She picked up the heavy cross and set it down again, turning it toward the window so the sombre light dimly illuminated the jewels. Brushed the leather cover of the Compendium with her fingertips. Untied the string on the manuscript file, took out the stack of pages, and carried it to her work station. She had touched each of those things as if she was receiving a secret message from it.
“I feel like I know less and less each day,” I commented.
“It was this manuscript that seemed to attract all his attention last time he dropped in to say hello,” she said from her seat, holding up the scorched sheet we had found on the floor. “But… well, I just don’t know either.”
She sighed and pulled open her backpack.
Before long we were hard at work-Raphaella reading and taking notes on the Savonarola chapter of the professor’s book, me cataloguing volume after volume of history books, my computer on the wheeled stand I had made in the shop. I had copied and synched Raphaella’s database so that any addition either of us made would show up on the other’s file. As I pushed forward with the tedious job of recording the author and title of each book, reading the spine and tapping keys, occasionally taking down an old book and checking the title page because the words on the spine were illegible, I tried to put the image of the friar’s ravaged face out of my mind. But it kept slipping back, insisting that I note every macabre, loathsome detail.