Flowers over the Inferno, page 6
That was the moment Lucia feared the most, for it was then that the ghosts appeared at the edge of the woods. Lucia had tried to tell her mother, but her mother refused to believe her. “Telling lies is naughty,” she’d rebuked her, before locking her in her room.
But the ghosts weren’t made up. Lucia had seen one. It had a face as pale as the snow that had frozen the village in the past few days, as white as the dog skull she had fished out of the river last summer with Mathias and Diego while Oliver stood apart and watched them.
Yes, that’s what the ghost looked like when it stared at her from the forest: a white and gleaming skull.
Lucia was certain that Mathias had seen one, too, the day before. He was the head of their group, the bravest of them all, and yet he’d looked scared at their last meeting; he’d been watching the trees just as she was doing now, as if they were alive and could return his gaze.
Lucia had left a bowl of milk beneath her window. It was full now, but she knew she’d find it empty in the morning—just as she had for the past few days, even though the cat hadn’t been home in a while.
Something else was slithering out of the forest, all the way up to her house. Something with a skull for a face.
Lucia had told her mother, but her mother hadn’t believed her.
-11-
AUSTRIA, 1978
“Observe, record, forget.”
Those were the rules of the School, unwritten commandments perpetuated by its employees, and passed down from veterans to newcomers. Nurse Braun had explained them to Magdalena, her voice barely louder than a whisper as if in deference to some holy vow of secrecy. And there were so many secrets in that place.
Magdalena had been tailing her more experienced colleague through the School’s maze of corridors. Nurse Braun had taught her about every nook and cranny of the neglected building and every task that would be assigned to her now that she’d begun working there. Her training had been rather strange; holed up in the same room all day, typing up notes she couldn’t really comprehend, Magdalena had seen nothing of the inner workings of the place outside of the refectory and the dormitory she retired to in the evenings.
By now she’d worked out that the School was staffed by only a handful of people: the director (whom she’d only seen once, on the day she was hired), Nurse Braun, two orderlies who performed all kinds of chores, the cook, and the kitchen maid, Marie, Magdalena’s roommate. Marie never spoke, and in all the long evenings Magdalena had so far spent reading in her room, Marie had given her nothing more than a couple of shy, vaguely fretful glances. Magdalena had given up on trying to talk to her and now limited herself to greeting her in the morning, and wishing her goodnight when the lights were switched off.
Not many people would have been able to adapt to life in such an isolated place; more importantly, employment at the School depended on a trait that few possessed: discretion. You had to be willing to maintain a certain reserve for the rest of your life.
It had been a particularly difficult time for Magdalena’s family, but then her aunt had found her this job.
“The School has high hopes for you. Do not disappoint it,” said Nurse Braun as she ascended the worn steps of the main staircase. She was walking ahead of Magdalena, her body stiff, her shoulders straight like the arms of the crucified Christ who watched them from the mezzanine floor. The crimson sunset filtered through a rose window, engraving the Christ’s sorrowful face and setting alight the blood that spilled out of his pierced ribcage. The crown of thorns on his head cast a bloated, twisted shadow on the plastered wall.
Like the tentacles of some monstrous beast, thought Magdalena, burrowing into her wool cardigan.
Nurse Braun always spoke of the School as a living, sentient being, as if its walls had eyes and ears: the School listened, and it passed judgment. Magdalena had been alarmed to hear her speak in this manner.
They reached the first floor where the Hive was located. It was so silent that it might as well have been empty. Their bodies carved through the air as if it hadn’t been disturbed for centuries and had absorbed in that endless time the lives and stories of all those that had previously passed through it. Magdalena could feel its weight on her breastbone, on her throat. It squeezed around her until there was almost no room left for her to breathe.
“Observe, record, forget.”
Those words meant that nothing that happened inside the School must ever be known beyond its confines. Nurse Braun had explained to her that she might occasionally witness practices she might deem bizarre. She must study their effects and meticulously record them in the notebook she’d received with her uniform.
Afterwards, she must forget it all. Every single thing.
Magdalena saw her take a bunch of keys from the pocket of her uniform, insert one into the keyhole, and pause.
“You will be responsible for their hygiene and nutrition,” she said, reiterating Magdalena’s tasks, “but you must never, ever cuddle them, or even speak a word to them. Physical contact must be kept to a minimum.”
Magdalena nodded, wondering whether the residents were affected by some sort of medical condition. She hadn’t mustered the courage to ask.
“And be careful with the subject in cot thirty-nine,” her supervisor continued.
Magdalena’s unease turned to worry.
“Why?” she finally asked.
Nurse Braun looked away, her eyes on the lake that could be seen beyond one of the windows.
“You’ll see,” was all she said. She gestured at Magdalena to pull over her head the piece of fabric she had been holding. Together, they lowered white veils over their faces.
“Remember,” she said just before she pushed the door handle. “Observe, record, forget.”
-12-
There was something distasteful in how quickly one could return to the habits of day-to-day life so soon after having laid eyes on a dead man—a kind of ignominious vitality, a sense of relief for having been spared a similar fate.
It felt aberrant, diving back into an everyday routine while a fellow human being’s mutilated corpse lay trapped in a steel box inside a morgue.
People die every day, Teresa reminded herself. It was just another aspect of life. And yet, it was an uncomfortable thing to witness. It had you savoring every breath you took even while somebody else mourned a person who would never breathe again. It was cruel and inexorable. It was human.
She pulled her front door shut behind her, shrugged off her shoulder bag, and kicked off her shoes. The warmth of the wooden floor beneath her feet reminded her that sometimes it was the simple things that could soothe the soul, like those summers when she was a little girl and ran barefoot through the vineyards, stirring up dust and laughter. She could still smell the mineral scent of sun-baked earth and salt-rich stone, the sour odor of the green vines, the sweet flowering acacias. Sweat, the bitterness of dandelion flowers, drops of wine on her lips, stolen from her grandfather’s glass. The essence of happiness.
It was a time that she remembered vividly, the memory amplified by the stillness of her home, still immersed in a silence that had remained unbroken since she’d walked out a few hours earlier. Solitude was an unobtrusive housemate; it took up no room and never touched anything. It had no smell or color. It was an absence, an entity defined in contrast to its opposite. Yet it existed; it was the force that made Teresa’s cup of chamomile tea shake on its saucer on those nights when sleep refused to come to her rescue. That tinkling would spread through the house without ever encountering the warmth of another living creature. Solitude wrapped itself around Teresa like a dress a size too small, like an old-fashioned corset that makes you stand up straighter when others can see you, but leaves you gasping for breath when you’re on your own.
She had learned to treat loneliness by applying the same principle that makes an antidote work on poison: she absorbed a small dose of it every day. She didn’t try to elude it, nor did she seek distractions; she stood her ground and let it bite.
The house greeted her with the black and white smiles in the magnified photographs on the walls: cheerful, sometimes brazen, often imbued with a hint of melancholy that added to their effect. These were the friends who kept her company every evening when she picked up a book and settled into her sofa: Louis Armstrong, Ella Fitzgerald, Duke Ellington, Jeff Buckley . . . Her hibernating soul would come awake with a jolt of pleasure at the sound of their voices. She had bought the prints at a flea market, back when she could still bring herself to get in the car on a weekend and drive for miles looking for things to add to her nest. But that nest had never quite lived up to its name, and she’d spent most of her life there alone. It had taken her a long time to shrug off the sadness.
But she had kept moving, one step at a time, and in spite of everything, she was still standing. She hadn’t lost her way, and she had forgiven herself. Life could be terrifying when you really looked at it and discovered what it could morph into, but it was still sacred, inviolable, a momentous journey to be faced with a racing heart and a sense of wonder.
She had to believe that, or else she would have lost her mind long ago.
“We’re never truly alone,” she murmured into the silence.
She wasn’t sure whether she really believed that, or if it was merely a pretense designed to keep her going.
Her fingers brushed over the musical box that rested on the ottoman bench in the living room. The box was the only object in the house that had remained unaltered over the years. It was made of turquoise ceramic decorated with small yellow stars and shaped into the form of a sleeping angel, whose wings of fire-forged clay embraced Teresa and all her sorrows.
It smelled of talcum powder and shattered dreams. She wound it up.
The melody flowed out in notes that sounded like the tinkling of a little bell. It had always seemed agonizingly beautiful to Teresa, a lullaby that made her think of stars immersed in an indigo sea, stretching beyond ephemeral, silver-lined clouds: the enigma of the universe, a mystery that had endured through billions of years.
Teresa was not religious, she didn’t really know what she believed in, but if she’d ever been asked for a sign, any sign, of some kind of divine presence in her life, she would have pointed at that sleeping angel, who hurt her with painful memories but also suffused her with a tenderness that heralded comfort.
She wondered if all that pain would finally mean something after she died: tiny fingers to hold, a soft cheek to kiss, the warmth of an angel she could finally look in the eye and cradle close to her heart.
No, she was never truly alone.
She allowed her melancholy to guide her steps as she moved from room to room, keeping time with that aching lullaby. In the bathroom, she undressed, averting her gaze from the shapeless body reflected in the mirror. After a quick shower, she prepared for her nightly ritual, retrieving from the cabinet her glucose meter and blood lancet. She inserted the needle and secured the cap. She set it to the length required to pierce her skin and pricked the edge of a fingertip. A few drops of dark blood onto the glucose test strip. Seconds later, a reassuring figure on the screen. She picked up an insulin pen. Needles again. After years of this daily torture, they had become her very own crown of thorns. She felt her thighs for a spot that wasn’t yet sore, and jabbed.
She sat on the edge of the bathtub for a time, looking at the tiles on the wall, then got up to tidy the room, concealing the traces of her illness inside the cabinet. She dressed wearily, as if the weight of the past few hours had made her body heavier than it actually was.
She went to the kitchen to make some dinner, something she could snack on while leafing through a book on the couch. Maybe she’d have a glass of wine with it, something to help her unwind and ease her into sleep.
She opened the fridge, and suddenly she felt as if she were floating in a sea of anonymous objects. Something else had materialized with the light that had switched itself on when she’d opened the door: a void. She couldn’t recall what anything was called anymore. She turned her head this way and that in bewilderment, but her brain seemed only to register meaningless images, figures whose purpose and processes she couldn’t identify.
She tried to speak, but her tongue felt like it had shrivelled up, and her jaw had stiffened in panic.
This was her world, but she couldn’t recognize it.
She noticed that the lullaby had ended. Her angel had gone back to sleep just when she needed him the most. She was alone again. Alone and afraid.
-13-
Massimo hadn’t slept. He’d spent the few hours of rest that Superintendent Battaglia had conceded her team drafting the report she’d requested from him. He had rewritten entire paragraphs several times before he was satisfied he’d gotten them right, and finally he had convinced himself he’d done a decent enough job. The night had just begun to fade by the time he’d emailed it to her, so he had been surprised to receive confirmation that his email had been read only moments after he’d sent it.
Like him, Teresa Battaglia was still awake, and like him, she was probably thinking about the murder that had taken place in that forest, sixty miles away. Massimo knew from his own experience how difficult it was to shake off the burden that this kind of evil placed on the psyche. He had always thought that the passage of time and the steady supply of dead bodies would eventually alleviate it, but now he knew better. He had seen men killed for spare change, women abused by those who claimed to love them, and children raised in unspeakable squalor, and yet his soul remained exposed, unshielded by the armor of indifference, and still grieved for every fallen creature.
He arrived at the police station very early, making no effort to deceive himself as to why: he had done it for her. Perhaps he was trying to make up for their disastrous first meeting—or, more likely, he wanted to impress that strong-willed woman who seemed determined to regard him as anything but a competent police officer.
He awaited her arrival in the office, armed with a gift and some news. He was sure she’d appreciate the former, but wasn’t so confident about the latter.
Superintendent Battaglia walked in with Parisi and De Carli, another officer from her team who was practically her shadow. She was pointing something out on a piece of paper, and her face looked strained. The two men were nodding attentively, occasionally making a comment of their own. Together, they were clearly a triad, three elements that formed a single unit: the superintendent was the pivot and the two officers the arms of a well-oiled mechanism. Teresa spoke in terse sentences that she often left unfinished; it didn’t matter, her companions already knew what she meant. They completed her sentences for her, and promptly assured her that whatever she requested, she could consider it done. They were not trying to suck up to her, it was simply, deep-seated respect.
Massimo suddenly felt foolish about his gift. He placed it on the superintendent’s desk, pushing it away with a finger as if in a last-ditch attempt to distance himself from it. Even the fact that he had sat down suddenly felt like a rash decision.
The trio’s attention was drawn by this slight movement and the rustling of the wrapping paper. Massimo watched as the superintendent’s expression shifted from surprise to irritation, like a large cat coming across some unappetizing prey trespassing on its territory.
“What are you doing in my office?” she asked, every syllable marked out like a bite. This was not a good sign.
Massimo didn’t quite know how to break the news to her. He would have rather started with the gift.
“It’s my office, too, now,” he said.
“Come again?”
Massimo had a feeling she’d heard him the first time.
“There’s a burst water pipe in my office,” he explained, his tone not nearly as confident as he’d intended. “I’ll have to work in here for a while. With you. That’s what Chief Ambrosini said.”
Massimo saw Parisi and De Carli exchange a glance. Judging by the looks on their faces, the superintendent was not going to be pleased by this development.
“What’s that?” she asked instead, spotting the gift.
“It’s for you,” said Massimo, feeling heartened. Perhaps there was a chance things between them could improve after all.
The superintendent sat at her desk. She studied the package. She opened it.
“Shit.”
“Superintendent . . .” said Parisi, smoothing his perfectly symmetrical goatee, but she silenced him. She picked up one of the krapfen inside the box and sank her teeth into it, closing her eyes. The doughnut oozed its cream obscenely.
“There’s some in there with chocolate filling,” said Massimo softly, invitingly, and gesturing at the others to help themselves. But they kept watching the superintendent, looking concerned.
Teresa nodded slowly, her eyes still closed. She was in a state of ecstasy.
“I haven’t had one of these in forever,” she murmured.
Massimo smiled. He had finally glimpsed something human in her—other than her irritation. It had been easy, after all.
“You’d have been better off keeping it that way.” It was De Carli who had spoken, and he seemed anxious.
Superintendent Battaglia opened her eyes: they were like slits.
“I am diabetic.”
It took Massimo a moment to grasp the implication of her words, and when he did, he tried to take the box back, swearing under his breath. But she placed her hand on it, defiant.
“Are you trying to kill me?” she asked him.
He could feel his face burning.
“You must learn not to blush, Inspector. And when you feel the urge to swear, for God’s sake just do it!” she said, letting go of the package. She gestured at Parisi and De Carli to leave and take it with them. They closed the door as they walked out, as if to contain the conflagration likely to be ignited by the superintendent’s fury. Massimo could picture it already: words fired like bullets ringing in his ears, the explosion of her rage.
