Page 24

Julia gathered her purse, got out, and entered the villa, following the aroma of tomatoes, onion, and garlic into the kitchen, where Anna Mattia was putting fresh basil on top of a delicious-looking platter of gnocchi covered with tomato sauce. “Hi, Anna Mattia, sorry I slept.”

“Signora, you better?” Anna Mattia frowned, concerned, and Julia decided not to tell her about being followed.

“Yes. Dinner looks great.”

“ Grazie . Piero pick you at Marucelliana?”

“Yes, it’s beautiful. The librarian’s going to take me to Forlì and Imola tomorrow to learn about Caterina Sforza.”

“Good.” Anna Mattia smiled. “Is gnocchi for dinner. Tomorrow, I teach you to make?”

“Yes,” Julia said, going to wash her hands. “Tomorrow.”

After dinner, Anna Mattia went home, and Julia sat at her laptop at the dining room table researching Caterina Sforza.

She plugged the name into Google and to her surprise, got a zillion results.

She tried the top three and realized the avatar of Caterina Sforza appeared in Assassin’s Creed II , a video game.

Just then her laptop pinged with an incoming text, and she glanced at the preview in the upper corner. Julia, Your table at Vetri is almost ready! Still joining us for dinner tomorrow? Press Y to Confirm or N to Cancel.

Oh God. Julia felt stricken. It was a reservation she’d made to celebrate her wedding anniversary. It was tomorrow, and she’d completely forgotten. She couldn’t believe it. She’d lost track of time. She felt sick with guilt. Mike hadn’t even been gone a year. She eyed the text, unable to press N.

In the next moment, the laptop screen flickered, pixelated, and went completely black. She glanced at the bar. She hadn’t lost Internet. She didn’t know what the matter was. She hit Enter a few times, but it didn’t come back.

She was about to click Restart but her screen saver flickered to life, a selfie of her and Mike.

Their heads were touching, and they were grinning ear to ear.

He was in his white Fightin’ Irish T-shirt, his freckles on full display.

They’d been at the farmers market, their Saturday-morning errand, picking goat cheese, a running debate.

She liked it plain but he liked jalapeno.

Jules, try it, just once.

Is this a love test?

Of course, silly.

Suddenly the selfie began to dematerialize on the screen. The faces pixelated and then disintegrated. The screen flickered to black. The laptop slammed closed with a smak!

Julia recoiled, gasping. The lights in the room went off, plunging her into darkness. She tried to get up but couldn’t. She tried to scream but no sound came out.

Her laptop rose into the air, levitating inch by inch in front of her.

She felt stark, cold fear. She struggled to get up and run away. She couldn’t move.

Her laptop flew against the wall, crashed with a loud bam , and fell to the floor. She was pinned to her chair. Next her laptop opened like a huge maw, blasting intense blue light at her.

Julia tried to shield her eyes. She couldn’t move her arms. The blue light enveloped her, engulfed her, drowned her in a sea of blue, seeping into her body, entering her through her eyes, its color the electric blue of Caterina’s eyes, then the cobalt blue of the hoodie, then the lapis lazuli of the Zodiac fresco, and suddenly she was in the Zodiac calendar on the domed ceiling of the entrance hall.

She began spinning into the air, whirling faster and faster past the golden glyphs of the Zodiac signs, then the Zodiac signs themselves.

She screamed and screamed to stop spinning but she only spun faster and faster, whirling around, and she put out her arms to slow herself but it didn’t work, and in the next moment, there was nothing she could do to protect herself from Taurus goring her in the chest with his pointed horns, stabbing her again and again until she gushed blood from every wound, spewing all around her, spattering hot red lifeblood all over the Zodiac signs, hideously warm on her face.

A scarlet Cancer the Crab grabbed her with gigantic pincers, then suddenly there were ten crabs, then a hundred, then a thousand giant crabs plucking out her eyes, tearing off her skin, ripping muscles from her bones until she was nothing but a skeleton spinning madly on its own rotation.

Leo the Lion gobbled up her bones, crunching them, swallowing her down, and the Scorpion poisoned her with his tail, pumping venom into her, then all of the Zodiac signs were whirling around her, all of their glyphs whizzing past her.

She was spinning and spinning into orbit herself, corkscrewing past the burning blazing fireball of the Sun and spiraling farther and farther away from Earth and into the blue black of the cosmos and she cried out and screamed, trying to get back but she couldn’t, her own rotation was on a trajectory that couldn’t be reversed, passing Jupiter, then Saturn and Uranus, expelled from the solar system beyond Neptune and Pluto and into space.

She felt the sheer terror of being so alone, all alone in the blackness and the void without depth and without end, and it turned cold then freezing and blacker and bluer until she saw Mike’s eyes fix like ice and she was dying out here in the nowhere away from Earth, away from people, away from life, away from everything until she was sucked into a bluish black darkness.

Julia was running for the front door. She didn’t know if she was in space or on Earth. She didn’t know what was happening. She tore the door open and it flew off the hinges and zoomed into space and she raced outside into the cold dark night.

“Anna Mattia!” Julia barreled toward their carriage house and down the hill, half running and half tripping. She panted hard, her breath ragged from exertion and fear.

She had to keep going. She didn’t know if she was spinning or running.

The lights went on in the carriage house. Piero hustled out bare chested in his pants. Anna Mattia was on his heels, closing her robe.

“Help!” Julia ran to them and buried herself in Anna Mattia’s arms, trying to hold on to something, to feel something warm and human beneath her fingers, something soft and solid, and real .

“Signora, Signora, is okay!” Anna Mattia rocked her like a child. “Is okay!”

“Please, please, please, help me,” Julia said, sagging to the ground.

Later, Julia stood in the dining room with Anna Mattia and Piero, ashamed, appalled, and unable to even speak. Everything was back to normal. The lights were on. Her laptop sat on the table, intact and open. There was no blue light anywhere. It looked as if nothing had ever happened at all.

Julia was losing her mind, bit by bit. It couldn’t have been a nightmare because she wasn’t asleep, unless she’d fallen asleep.

It felt more like a dream, a vision, a spell, but it was horrible, so horrible.

She never wanted to experience anything like that again, but she feared that she would, that it was inevitable as long as she was in this house, as long as Caterina was here somewhere and maybe even Rossi, too, all of the spirits alive and dead, all of them with her, all of the time.

Anna Mattia looked down, pursing her lips. Piero stood by the wall, his face in solemn lines. He held a pistol, which Julia knew couldn’t help her now.

“This has to stop,” she said, hushed.

But she didn’t know who she was talking to.