The Dark Man
Kristine Kathryn Rusch
Condi stepped out of the internet café, an ice-cold bottle of Coke in her hand. The street was dark except for the light spewing out of the café’s door. Motorcycles were parked to her left, squeezed between smart cars that had slid bumper-first into slots too small for a regular car.
In America, this would be called an alley, if someone deigned to designate it at all. Crooked, covered with uneven cobblestones, winding uphill between darkened and graffiti-covered buildings, the street felt more like a path between main roads.
The internet café didn’t help. It was the only business still open at 11 o’clock at night, still open and still doing business. The hotel across the way locked its doors promptly at nine, something she thought unfair in Rome, which like most Mediterranean cities remained awake and active long past midnight.
Fortunately, Condi was staying in a slightly more up-scale place on the Via Purificazione, another alley-like side street in a slightly more desirable neighborhood near the Via Veneto. She wasn’t there for the shopping; she wanted to be as close to the American Embassy as possible without paying Westin Excelsior prices.
Not that money was an object. The Organization of Strange Phenomena Ancient and Modern was paying for everything, including the tiny, expensive bottle of Coke resting damply in her right hand. She had an unlimited expense account, and a salary fifty times higher than her going rate as one of the Rocky Mountain News’s best reporters—back when there had been a Rocky Mountain News.
Condi glanced over her shoulder. Inside the café, which wasn’t really a café at all—just three narrow rooms of computers and two vending machines—the waif who ran the place was surreptitiously checking the information Condi had left on her computer screen.
The waif, with her big brown eyes, round cheeks, black-black hair, looked like a cute Italian kid straight out of La Dolce Vita, or at least she did until you factored in the piercings, the tattoos, and the leather bus-tier, which seemed just too hot to wear in this strange 100-degree Roman autumn. Condi had already clocked out, leaving the screen on a UFO social networking site filled with wackos.
The waif always captured that last screen, missing the important stuff—or so Condi hoped. She tried to check her e-mail several times per day on her iPhone, but the AT&T connection in Rome was spotty at best—hell, all wireless connections were spotty here—and she was afraid she lost a lot of information.
She waited until the waif stopped checking the screen capture. Then Condi sighed and stepped onto the cobblestone street, heading up hill to the Via Sistina. Ahead, she could hear music and laughter. Behind her, she heard the whisper of shoes against cobblestones.
She didn’t have to turn around to know he was following her again.
She didn’t know his name or even what he wanted, but she did know what he looked like. Black hair, high cheekbones, traditional Roman features, all assembled into a classically handsome face, one that could’ve been stamped on a coin a thousand years before, although he was taller than the average Roman and had broader shoulders.
He’d shown up on her first morning in Rome, sitting behind one of the flower vendors on the Spanish Steps, and he’d been around ever since. He had watched her with an avid interest that would have unnerved her anywhere else.
But this was Italy, and Italian men were famously forward. In her first week here, she’d had her butt pinched several times. She’d had her breasts brushed—oh, scusi, signora—and one man had caught her in a wild 1940s V-E Day-style kiss.
She had shoved him away, threatening in her excellent Italian to cut off his privates, cook them in olive oil, and serve them to the pigs. That had gotten her applause and a bit of distance. The vendors nearby, and there were dozens, called her the Untouchable American, and had even started to consider her as something other than a tourist.
She knew better than to expect to be treated like an Italian. It handicapped her, but she had accepted that when she accepted the assignment, silently cursing the location of the phenomenon.
Anywhere but Rome, famous for its hatred of tourists, with its centuries-old secrets and its thousand-year-long lies.
That she had picked up one tail didn’t surprise her.
That she had picked up only one did.
Tavernas and (weirdly) gelato shops were open on the Via Sistina, sandwiched between shuttered clothing stores and restaurants. From the top of one of Rome’s famed Seven Hills, light flowed down, bringing with it the music and laughter she had heard on the side street.
The walk up the hill was steep, the sidewalk narrow. The walk at night was best—fewer pedestrians, fewer limousines—but had its own treacheries. She had learned, in her six weeks in Rome, to beware large groups. Usually they included their fair share of pick-pockets and thieves. Most locals looked the other way, figuring tourists got what they deserved.
The man behind her didn’t want to attack her. If he did, he would have done so weeks ago. He wanted to observe her, for reasons she didn’t want to think about.
She wished he wasn’t here tonight. Tonight was crucial to help her plan for tomorrow morning, and she didn’t want him to know what she was about.
The lights got brighter around the Intercontinental Hotel near the top of the hill. Two limousines were parked near the doorway, two doormen talking to the drivers as if they were all waiting for some VIPs to show up and show them around.
Just above them, on the Piazza Trinità dei Monti, sat the largest vendor cart Condi had seen in Rome. The cart was really a miniature market which sold everything from Gatorade to a cheap panino with the meat cooked right on the spot. The smell of grilled lamb filtered down to her now, and she wondered how the most expensive restaurant in the area—on the roof of the Hassler Hotel—liked the competition.
She stopped at the top of the hill, the city sprawled out before her. In the daylight, she could make out St. Paul’s Cathedral and all the other landmarks. At night, they faded into a series of domed lights at the top of the other hills, with less-defined lights leading up to them.
The artists had folded up their carts and the professional beggars were gone. One of the nearby restaurants had illegally moved its tables onto the Piazza so that the patrons could enjoy the warm night. A string quartet played Vivaldi.
The Steps themselves were well lit, the flowers in the pots alongside looking festive in the bright lights.
Below, she could see the Barcaccia Fountain, and the crowd around it, drunk and partying. The restaurants on the Piazza di Spagna were open late, catering to the tourists.
She ignored them. They would be gone in a few days, replaced by other tourists, also bent on drinking their way through the hot Italian nights.
She was more interested in the Steps themselves.
Built between 1723 and 1725 by Francesco de Sanctis, the Steps took their name from the Spanish Embassy, which had moved there in the nineteenth century and had since moved on. Locals sneered on the area because it had long been home to the expatriate English community in Rome, a community that had once included John Keats and several other famous British literary figures.
Condi had learned all she could about the Steps—how long they had been there, how they were actually paid for by the French who once owned the church at the hill’s top, the Church of Trinità dei Monti, which, so far as she could tell, was always closed.
She had walked up and down the travertine steps several times a day, always looking at one landing in particular, a place where none of the professional beggars ever set up shop, where tourists who normally sat down from exhaustion somehow never reclined despite a bit of shade.
She had several hundred photographs of that spot, some taken by tourists as far back as the 1920s, and some by professional photographers that were even older, going back to the invention of the box camera in the mid-nineteenth century.
Some photos were fascinating, some were not. Some were of the steps, glistening in the rain or gleaming in the sunshine, and some were of a dark form sprawled along them, looking like the black painted shadow of a body burned into the stone.
It had taken her months to figure out when the body appeared and when it disappeared. That had been part of her assignment—a crazy assignment that had come two days after the last paper she’d applied to reminded her that hundreds of reporters (even those with multiple investigative reporting awards) were out of work.
She had no idea how many of her unemployed colleagues had turned down work with the Organization of Strange Phenomena Ancient and Modern. Some days she liked to think she was the only reporter they had approached. Other days she wondered if she was the only reporter they had approached who had decided to check her integrity at the door.
Not that she had checked it entirely. She had told the Organization that she’d investigate any phenomenon they sent her to, but if she discovered a hoax—and frankly, she had said, I think they’re all going to be hoaxes—she would let them know. She wouldn’t sugar-coat anything, she wouldn’t lie about anything, and she wouldn’t spin facts just to support some conclusion they were paying her hundreds of thousands to confirm.
In her first six months with the Organization, she’d disproven a dozen so-called unexplainable occurrences. The one thing she’d learned as a reporter was that nothing was unexplainable. She just had to dig until she found the explanation, one that satisfied both her and her bosses.
Although standing at the edge of the Piazza Trinità dei Monti on the top of the Spanish Steps, she had a moment of doubt that she would ever find an explanation for the black form.
It was the first case that fascinated her. Reports of the form’s appearance started in the months before John Keats died in the building right next to the Steps. Supposedly, Keats—ill with the consumption that would eventually kill him—looked out the house’s window and saw the black figure appear.
It is an omen, he told his companion Joseph Severn. I have seen Death. It awaits me, there, on those Steps.
Severn saw the figure as well, and thought it a cruel hoax, a drawing made by someone who wanted to frighten the superstitious English. Hours later, he reported in his journal, the figure was gone, destroyed by one of the many wintry downpours that helped demolish what remained of Keats’s health.
From that moment on, sightings of the black figure showed up in the literature and not always from English expatriates. Sometimes, the sightings showed up in the Italian press. Sometimes in travel journals of the very wealthy who had made Rome part of their continental tour.
Several artists—professionals as well as amateurs—added the figure into their paintings of the Steps. Sometimes the figure was part of a dark and sinister portrait, and sometimes it was the only black spot in the middle of a perfectly painted sunny day, complete with azaleas and beautiful women.
Even in the paintings, though, the figure was in the same position, sprawled along the steps, looking like nothing more than the shade of a dead man trapped for a moment in bright sunshine.
She had pored over all of the evidence—and thanks to the internet, there was a lot of it. She had found nearly two hundred years of paintings and photographs, amateur and professional, thousands of pages of diary and journal entries, plus every single mention in books about strange phenomenon published in every single language she could read.
She combined all of her data, and learned that the figure appeared with startling regularity. The average paranormal investigator never noticed because the appearances weren’t to the minute. The paranormal investigators found that the figure appeared roughly every ten years within a particular time frame, but none of them had taken the time (or maybe had lacked the ability) to do the math.
The figure appeared ten years, fifteen days, and thirty hours from the previous appearance. It remained visible for thirty minutes. Nothing seemed to change this pattern. In previous sightings, people had grabbed it (it felt like touching pitch, one traveler had written), shaken it, tried to pick it up (it didn’t budge, as if it were attached to the very step itself, wrote another traveler), and had poked it with various objects, including knives. Some had tried to light it on fire, and that hadn’t worked either.
In 1971, the height of what Condi privately called “the crazies,” paranormal investigators tried to slice bits off the figure. They had so-called psychics touch it, trying to get a reading, and they touched the figure with all kinds of things from thermometers to Geiger counters. They got nothing, no readings at all—and there should have been some kind of reading, even from a static state. The slices failed as well. The figure’s black essence broke the knives. Someone left the scene to get a battery-operated meat cutter, but the figure had disappeared before that someone returned.
Ten years later, no one wanted to carve the figure up. Ten years after that, camera crews assembled to record the phenomenon, and they got as much information as the box cameras had a century before. Which was not much at all.
She had watched the footage of all of this, read all of the reports, and had decided that something did appear on the steps. Whether it was some kind of local/natural phenomenon, she didn’t know. She really didn’t have much of a plan herself, except that she would use some high-end analysis equipment that hadn’t even existed twenty years before. (It had been twenty years since someone analyzed the figure, since the last appearance had occurred five days after 9/11. No one really cared about a spooky black figure in that week. The entire world had been fearfully focused on the United States.)
She had a hunch she wouldn’t resolve anything this time either. She would gather enough material for a theory that someone else would have to prove ten years from now. Maybe she’d get a book out of it—one that featured a lot of lovely sketches, paintings, and photographs from the past 190 years. The Organization didn’t care what she did with the information from her reports after she blogged about them and answered questions from commenters on the website.
Then the information belonged to her.
She was going to become known for the wacky and strange instead of the in-depth and insightful. That bothered her sometimes. At other times, she was realistic enough to remind herself that at least she would become known. So many of her colleagues had gone onto writing ad copy or teaching at community colleges.
She started down the Steps. They were slightly worn from nearly three centuries of constant use. She stopped just above the landing. The air felt chillier here. It always did, at least to her, and she knew that had nothing to do with the actual air itself, but her own frame of mind.
Just like the little shiver that ran through her the three times she had actually walked across the steps where the figure would eventually appear had nothing to do with the figure, and everything to do with her own irrational fear of what she might find.
“You know when it will appear.”
He stopped behind her, too close like Italian men always were. She didn’t move away. She didn’t worry about him picking her pocket—she only had a few euros on her. Her credit card and identification were tucked into a money belt hidden beneath the waistband of her pants, practically invisible, or so her hotel mirror told her every morning.
She had to tilt her head to see his face. He stood one step above her. The light from below reflected off his skin. He was older than she had thought, with fine lines beneath his eyes and around his mouth. Laugh lines, her mother would have called them.
But he wasn’t smiling now.
He was looking down on her like an avenging angel, the Church of Trinità dei Monti shadowing him from behind.
“Are you speaking to me?” she asked in her haughtiest Italian.
“You know that I am,” he said. “Just like you know I have been watching you since you first came to the Steps.”
She could have denied it, she supposed, although she saw no point. Just like she saw no point in backing away from him. That would only let him know he had power over her, power to startle her, power to unnerve her, power to make her worry for her own safety.
“You are waiting for it,” he said, “just like I am.”
She realized that anyone else listening to the conversation would hear that last comment as vaguely threatening, maybe even as something with sexual overtones.
But she knew there weren’t any sexual overtones—at least, not intentional ones. She wondered briefly if he was one of those men who knew how handsome he was and used that knowledge subconsciously to control the people around him.
She had a hunch he did.
“Who do you work for?” she asked.
His eyes half closed, shielding their expression from her. She felt a surge of adrenaline. He didn’t want her to know that piece of information.
“Are you one of those—what do you call it in English? Psychic investigators?” He used the English words for that last part, and he didn’t try to hide his contempt.
“I’m not psychic,” she said, “but I am hungry. Join me?”
She went around him, climbing back up the steps to the little restaurant on the Piazza. She didn’t wait to see if he followed; she knew he would eventually.
She flagged down a waiter, let him seat her at a table near the flowers, and watched as the man crossed the Piazza.
He handed the waiter a credit card, then gestured toward the table. The waiter smiled as if they had shared some kind of secret, then he disappeared into the restaurant itself.
The man sat down across from her. “I have ordered wine and bread. The waiter shall bring menus in a moment.”
She knew better than to refuse the wine, even though she really didn’t want any. The figure was scheduled to reappear shortly after six AM, and she wanted to be clearheaded.
She had planned on only making a short visit to the Steps this night, hoping to return to her hotel room for a few hours of sleep so that she wouldn’t be too drowsy come morning.
The bread arrived quickly, still warm from the oven, smelling divine. The waiter made a fuss of opening the wine, and spent nearly five minutes explaining to her its derivation, not that she cared.
The man studied her. When the waiter left, he leaned back in his chair. “You are not a typical American.”
She shrugged. “I don’t think there are typical Americans.”
“You are not rude,” he said.
“Thank you,” she said. “I think.”
He smiled. His teeth were even and very, very white. He had the look of a retired model, not of a thug. Which made him even more suspect in her opinion.
She sipped her wine. Red, rich, full-bodied, dark with a hint of pepper. She liked it more than she had expected.
“You said you were following me,” she said.
“Do not play coy,” he said. “You know that I was.”
She shrugged again. “I thought you were too shy to say hello.”
He laughed. “I am not shy.”
“Clearly,” she said.
“I was simply trying to be certain if you had a true interest or if you simply enjoyed the Steps themselves.”
She hadn’t thought of enjoyment. She knew that a lot of tourists did enjoy the Steps, spending hours here, chatting, eating, resting. But she had seen the entire area as something to be discovered, not as something to be enjoyed.
She wondered if her surprise at his comment showed on her face.
“True interest in what?” she asked.
“Now you are being coy,” he said.
“I don’t like elliptical conversations,” she said. “Tell me what you’re about.”
The waiter chose that moment to bring the menus. She didn’t even look at hers, ordering a cheese plate. Her companion didn’t order at all, saying the bread would be enough.
After the waiter left, the man extended his hand. “I am Giuseppe.”
“Condi,” she said, taking his hand to shake it. Instead, he held tightly, then turned her hand upward, kissing the center of her palm.
It was an oddly intimate gesture and it sent an involuntary shiver through her.
“Condi,” he said. “Like your secretary of state.”
“Former secretary of state,” Condi said, “and no, not like that at all. It’s a nickname that stuck early that has no real relation to my given name.”
Which she wasn’t about to tell him. Condi was short for Constance D. Platte, which was, she always contended, a stupid name. Her family called her Connie D., which her friends mercifully shortened to Condi nearly three decades before anyone had heard of Condoleezza Rice.
Condi didn’t take her hand back. She let him continue to hold it. She figured as long as he touched her, she had the right to ask him rude questions.
“So tell me, Giuseppe, what I should have a true interest in.”
“Tomorrow morning,” he said. “Six AM, you will be one of the few people on the Steps. We will all cluster around the same spot, waiting for him to return.”
She suppressed a sigh. He suddenly sounded like a religious nutball. “Him?”
“We do not know his name. We call him the Dark Man.”
The Dark Man—L’uomo Scuro. She liked how that sounded in Italian. It was a much better name than the figure, as she had been calling him.
“We?” she asked.
“Ah.” Giuseppe let go of her hand, giving it a tender pat before setting it on the table as if her skin were made of glass. “Not until I know who you are working for.”
“I’m a reporter.” One of the few conditions she had was that she couldn’t reveal the name of the Organization. Her boss told her the reason for that was simple: whenever anyone mentioned the Organization of Strange Phenomena Ancient and Modern, everyone assumed that it had bankrolled the specific result—which, her boss had reminded her, it had not.
“For whom do you report?” he asked.
“I got laid off from a Colorado paper, the Rocky Mountain News,” she said. “Like so many of my colleagues, I am going to write a book. Unlike most of them, I am not going to write about politics or America or some environmental disaster.”
“You’re going to write about the Dark Man.”
“Why not?” she said. “No one has published a definitive work in English.”
“No one has published a definitive work,” he said.
She slid her hand back as the waiter set the cheese plate down. It was large, on heavy bone china, with a dozen different cheeses. He set smaller plates in front of her and Giuseppe, then topped off their wine glasses, and flitted away, like a man who assumed people on a date needed privacy.
She took some cheese and some bread, making a small sandwich for herself. She never bothered to learn the names of the European cheeses, but she had come to recognize several, including some tart enough to go with the wine.
Giuseppe took some cheese as well.
“What’s your interest?” she asked.
“I protect him,” Giuseppe said simply.
“Against what?” she asked.
He smiled, only this time there was no warmth in his face. “Against people like you,” he said.
She left shortly after that. Even though he said he would pay for the food, she left some euros on the table, ignoring his protests.
He made her uncomfortable; she didn’t want to be beholden to him.
She took the long route back to her hotel, taking the Via Sistina to the Via Barberini because there would be more people and more light.
The wine she drank settled uneasily in her stomach, leaving a sharp aftertaste. When she reached the Piazza Barberini, she paused beneath an awning over a closed shop. The traffic—usually awful here—had virtually disappeared. The only sound was the water pouring through Bernini’s famous fountain of Triton in the very center of the road.
Her heart was pounding. She waited ten minutes, stepping back into the shadows, but Giuseppe hadn’t shown up.
Apparently he had stopped following her, now that he knew who she was and what she was about.
She hurried the long block to the Via Purificazione, then walked up the narrow street. Everything had shut down. She had to use her key to get into the hotel. The interior lights were on low. The night man had stepped away from the desk. She walked to the elevator, which seemed to take forever to reach the main floor.
As she rode upwards, she pulled her cell phone out of her pocket. She found the number for the Organization, but she didn’t activate the call until she got inside her room and turned the tiny television to CNN International.
It was the middle of the afternoon in Colorado. Her boss answered, sounding surprised to hear from her.
“I had a strange experience,” she said.
Then she told him all about Giuseppe, the way the man followed her, the way he had talked about the figure, and the fact that he had known exactly what time the “Dark Man” would appear.
“I need someone to look up the term L’uomo Scuro,” she said. “And see if there are any notes about protectors. And I need it immediately.”
Her boss didn’t question her. He promised to have someone call her in fifteen minutes.
Unfortunately, fifteen minutes later, the person who called her was Ross.
She had never learned Ross’s last name. She had worked with him before and he was, hands down, the best researcher on staff at the Organization. Unfortunately, he knew it, and made everyone else feel stupid.
“Haven’t read your Dan Brown, huh?” Ross said by way of introduction.
Already irritation threatened to overwhelm her. “I read the source material long before Dan Brown ever thought of writing The Da Vinci Code.” Listening to her own tone, she wondered who was trying to make whom feel stupid here. “I didn’t meet a flagellant monk tonight.”
“Not saying you did,” Ross said, his tone dry and amused. “But you should have expected a secret society. You are in Rome, after all.”
“Just tell me what you found,” she said.
“The Dark Man has been part of Italian mythology about that spot since the Spanish Steps were built,” he said. “I thought you knew Italian. You should’ve found this stuff on your own.”
“I never heard it called the Dark Man before tonight,” she said.
“Hmm,” he said in a tone that completely condemned her for a lack of intellectual rigor. She tensed, then made herself breathe out slowly.
She was hot, she was tired, and she had to get up early.
“What else?” she asked.
“He has his own society,” Ross said.
“What’s the society called?”
“That’s a question,” he said. “Some kind of protectorate, the Order of Something or Other. Very Dan Brown-like.”
“It would help if I knew,” she said.
“No one knows,” he said. “It could be this order or that order. What everyone does know—”
And he emphasized “everyone,” as if she were the only person on the planet lacking this knowledge.
“—is that if you try to hurt the Dark Man, someone will hurt you.”
“Great,” she said.
“You’re not trying to damage it, are you?” he asked.
“No,” she said. “I don’t suppose this Order has put its vast knowledge about the Dark Man on the internet.”
“It hasn’t, but a bunch of conspiracy theorists have,” he said. “They all have different theories.”
“I’m sure I’ve found most of those,” she said.
“Probably not,” Ross said. “But I don’t think it matters. It’s all the expected stuff anyway.”
She wasn’t sure what he meant by expected stuff, but she was sure she could find out. “Which one do you believe?”
“It doesn’t matter which one I believe,” he said. “It’s which one do they believe.”
She suppressed a sigh, but she did roll her eyes, catching her reflection in the mirror across the room. She looked as exasperated as she felt.
“Which one do they believe?” she asked.
“Aliens,” he said. “They think this is an alien invader, left behind.”
“Just one?” she asked.
“Just one,” he said.
“Who tries to attack all by his little lonesome every ten years?”
“I didn’t make up the theory,” Ross said, sounding defensive for the first time. “They’re your nutcases.”
“They’re not mine either,” she said, frowning. She hadn’t expected that. This was Italy after all. Catholic, superstitious, filled with saints and relics and dark magic, not filled with little green men and misunderstood weather balloons like Roswell, New Mexico.
This time, she did sigh out loud.
“Will they hurt me?” she asked.
“Hurt you?” Ross repeated as if the sentence did not compute. “Maybe if you try to shoot the thing with your raygun. How the hell should I know?”
“You’re the researcher,” she snapped. “You should’ve found out if they’re a threat.”
“I’m good on short notice,” he said. “I’m just not perfect.”
“Oh, I never doubted that,” she said, and hung up.
Aliens. UFOs. That fit into Strange Phenomena, Ancient and Modern. She almost wished it was a ghost, though, or a trick of the light, some kind of natural predictable familiar phenomenon.
She set the alarm on her phone. Five AM didn’t seem that far from now.
She closed the curtains in her room, cranked up the air conditioning, and fell into a deep, exhausted sleep.
The alarm brought her out of it a moment later—or so it seemed. Five AM looked the same as midnight had, same darkness, same feel. She got up, turned on the lights, and took a quick shower.
Then she grabbed her equipment bag and headed back to the Spanish Steps.
The morning was cool, comparatively speaking. It had to be about 80 instead of the 100 that had stifled Rome for the past few days. She wondered whether fall would ever show up—and if it did, whether or not she would recognize it as a brand new season.
She trudged up to the Spanish Steps, noting as she went how many merchants were already up, cleaning the small sidewalks in front of their shops, and rearranging the wares in the window. She bought a pastry from a cart vendor she’d never seen before and ate as she walked, decided that the pastry was so good the vendor probably sold out long before she normally got up.
The carts at the top of the Spanish Steps were still shuttered. The professional beggars hadn’t arrived yet. The restaurant tables, full and covered with food when she had left them, were stacked one on top of the other near the restaurant’s doors.
A small group of people hovered near the top of the steps, staring at the city unfolding before them. The thin light of dawn seemed brighter than an average day in Colorado and made Condi feel like she was very, very far from home.
She walked past the group, not seeing anyone she recognized, and headed down the Steps until she was only a few yards from the spot where the figure would turn up.
She set up the video camera she brought, turning it on so that she would get the moment of appearance. She would also make a recording on her phone as a backup.
The rest of the equipment remained in the bag. She would only remove it if she needed it.
She sat on her perch, the travertine steps surprisingly cool through her khaki pants, and waited. She wanted the figure to appear. She needed it to appear. She didn’t want to wait several more days for some kind of phenomenon that, until this point (at least for her), had only existed in artists’ renderings.
Then Giuseppe sat down beside her, too close as usual. He wore a cologne as peppery as the wine had been the night before and just as strong. Clearly he had just gotten up as well.
“So,” she said, irritated that he was sitting so close, irritated that he had frightened her the night before, irritated that he continued to bother her, “you guys think this is aliens, huh?”
He looked at her in surprise. She had a hunch that was the first unguarded expression she had ever seen on his face.
“You think I can’t do research?” she asked. “I had simply thought you guys were a rumor until last night.”
She didn’t want to tell him she hadn’t heard of his group until he had talked to her a few hours ago.
He didn’t say anything. She pulled out her phone, cupping it in her right hand.
“What do you think this is,” she asked, “some kind of portal and the aliens send one guy to it every ten years or so? Is this an invading army that hasn’t quite got the concept down?”
She didn’t try to cover the sarcasm in her voice.
“Not aliens,” he said. “Alien.”
“So you think it’s alien. Tell me something I don’t know.”
He shook his head again. “An alien.”
“That’s what I said.” She looked at the spot. “The one-by-one invading army. What keeps them out? Some kind of force field?”
“No,” he said. “We think it’s one single alien. The same alien. That it’s always been the same alien.”
He had her attention now. She moved her head so that she could watch him and the spot. “Over hundreds of years?”
“Yes,” he said.
“I don’t get it,” she said. “Is this a projection?”
He shook his head. “He’s out of phase.”
“Out of phase with what?” she asked.
“Us,” he said.
It took some explaining. Giuseppe had to switch from Italian to English and back again, because Condi didn’t know the scientific terms. Twice he had to use some Latin cognates, and she had to guess.
It came down to this: the Dark Man, the figure, moved at a much slower rate through time. He had fallen or was injured or had done something that put him in this particular spot, and made him phase into human time perceptions only briefly.
In spite of herself, she got caught up in the theory. “How do you know it’s time? Why can’t it be something else, like an image or something?”
“Oh,” Giuseppe said, “it could be a parallel universe that crosses into ours. But still there is some linkage, and time happens much slower in that other place.”
“And you’ve decided that he’s an alien and not a ghost because . . . ?”
“Because there were sightings of his ship,” Giuseppe said.
“When?” she asked.
“As the Steps were being finished,” he said. “I can show you the literature.”
“I’d like to see it,” she lied. She wished he weren’t a crazy. She wished his theory was based in some kind of reality. But she should have known it wasn’t when she first saw him trailing her with that protectiveness only the truly obsessed had toward the object of their obsession.
He continued to talk about it, and she asked the occasional question, surreptitiously glancing at the clock on her phone. She was experiencing time slowly, and she was convinced it was because of Giuseppe and the conversation.
“Don’t you have an assignment? Aren’t you supposed to be doing something?” she asked.
“I am doing it,” he said.
She looked at him sideways. “Babysitting me?”
He gave an elegant shrug. “I must be able to report that you did not hurt him.”
“Report to whom?” she asked.
He gave her a baleful look.
“I don’t see why you’re so secretive,” she said. “Do you have aliens in your organization or are you afraid they’ll find you out?”
“We do not know what they know,” he said. “We do not know what they see.”
She remembered her mother saying something very similar when Condi asked about God. How can he watch billions of people? Condi had asked. Why would he care?
The Bible says he does, her mother said.
But people wrote the Bible. What if it’s wrong?
In exasperation, her mother had said, We do not know what God knows. We do not know what he sees.
“What do you mean, what they see?” Condi said to Giuseppe. They had five minutes until the figure appeared.
“Time and space,” he said, “they are different.”
“I know,” she said, trying to keep the annoyance from her voice.
“The aliens experience time differently. So we do not know how they perceive the space around them.”
She frowned at him. “So if the Steps were torn down tomorrow . . .”
“It would be, perhaps, like an earthquake to him. A sudden change. We do not know.”
She looked at the spot on the Steps, which was still empty. “So you think the aliens are all around us, like the ultimate tourists. They walk the Spanish Steps like we do and we can’t perceive them?”
“Something like that,” he said, looking away from her.
“Then why do we see him?” she asked.
“Perhaps because he has not moved,” he said. “Perhaps because he has crossed a little into our time.”
Then he lowered his voice.
“Perhaps because he is dead.”
She shuddered—and at that very moment, the figure appeared. Even though she had expected it, she jumped. He—and it was clearly a he—was sprawled along the steps like he had fallen there.
He was as big as she was, thicker than she imagined, and glossy black. The blackness looked shiny, like some kind of metal. She wanted to touch him, but didn’t dare, not with Giuseppe next to her.
She checked to see if her cell phone was recording this. It was. Then she moved the phone to her other hand and removed some of her equipment from her bag. She tried not to take her gaze off the figure.
He didn’t move. He looked like he should move. He looked like he could easily get up. Two arms, two legs, a torso—very humanlike, except that she saw no features. No face, just a smooth surface.
She couldn’t even tell if he had fallen (if he had fallen) face-down or face-up.
And the reports lied.
He had an odor. A faint one, dry and dusty but machine-like, almost like she had stepped inside an empty mechanic’s bay.
She rubbed her nose, wondering if the scent was real or if she imagined it. Or if Giuseppe’s cologne interfered with it.
“May I touch him?” she said. “I promise not to hurt him.”
“We do not know what hurts him,” Giuseppe said.
She glanced at him. “If you’re right and he’s experiencing time slowly, he won’t even know that I brush against him.”
Giuseppe didn’t argue. So she leaned forward and swiped her finger along the figure’s arm.
She shuddered. Pitch wasn’t quite right, but close. Like tar that hadn’t completely set—rubbery, but soft, almost like partially baked cookie dough. But that wasn’t right either.
Something in the feel of him was wrong, so wrong she wanted to step away. She resisted the urge to rub her fingers against her pants. Instead she touched them to one of the handheld analyzers the Organization had supplied her with.
Other people had gathered. Many had cameras and cell phones, others had handheld pieces of equipment. They were taking readings. One man, using the light meter for his camera, said the light was different in the area around the figure than it was just a few meters away.
She didn’t know what to make of that, just like she didn’t know what to make of all the information she was gathering. Most of it made no sense to her. She was there to run the equipment, not analyze the data.
She did as she was told, collecting everything, watching and working, and listening to what everyone else said.
Somewhere in the confusion, Giuseppe moved away from her. The figure was all that existed for her—for her and the dozen people around her, people trying to figure out the phenomenon just like she was.
Then, just as suddenly as he appeared, the figure vanished.
And, it seemed, the morning got a little brighter. Had the man with the light meter been correct? Had the figure changed the light? Or had he brought a bit of his slower-moving universe with him?
She backed up the readings on the USBs the Organization had provided her. Then she gathered the camera she had placed a few feet away.
She was shaking, her breath coming in ragged gasps. She was in some kind of shock, some kind of near-denial. She wanted to tell herself that the thirty minutes hadn’t happened, and yet it had.
And that was the surprise. She never expected the figure—L’uomo Scuro—to appear. Only the name Dark Man wasn’t right either. He was something else. She would have thought him a robot or a sculpted bit of art if she hadn’t touched him.
If his strange skin (should she call it skin?) hadn’t been warm.
She shuddered.
Giuseppe made his way toward her. She stepped away from him. The experience had been too weird to dissect. She didn’t want his perspective to contaminate hers.
She gathered her belongings, took one last shot of the empty place on the Steps, then climbed up them. At the top of the hill, she tried to send the data from her phone. She couldn’t tell if it went through.
She would have to send it all through the internet café, and she really didn’t want to.
But she had no other choice.
The waif was not there as the café opened at seven, which had to be some kind of record, a business opening that early in Rome. Another young woman, this one without piercings, wearing a tasteful sundress, didn’t seem interested in Condi at all.
Condi sent the information as well as a brief blog, promising to send backups by FedEx later in the day. Somehow the Organization would get the information.
She didn’t know what they would do with it.
She didn’t know what she would do with it either. But it made her feel odd.
As she watched the little blue bar that told her the information was going across the internet, traveling as bits of information across a space impossible to traverse instantly when the first appearance of the figure was first recorded, she tried to calm herself down.
She had felt like this when she had discovered corruption in Denver’s city council elections. She had felt like this when she had found the smoking gun in a military airplane crash not far from Fort Collins. She had felt like this during all the major discoveries of her career.
Only she had known what those meant.
She wasn’t sure what this one meant.
Except that it had shaken her assumptions.
Frankly, she had said during her job interview, I think they’re all going to be hoaxes.
Only this one was not. She had investigated the area for weeks, knew there was nothing beneath it, no way for the figure to suddenly appear without some obvious help.
Unless someone was using technology she didn’t understand—and had used that technology for centuries.
She gathered her equipment, put it away, used the remaining computer time to surf the news sites, seeing if anyone covered the reappearance of the Dark Man.
Not yet. But she suspected he would appear on YouTube quite soon now—and she felt tempted to put him up herself.
But that would mean editing her phone video, taking out the conversation with Giuseppe, which she had deliberately sent back to the Organization.
She didn’t know what they would think about his theories. Had she heard them without seeing the figure, she would have dismissed them out of hand.
But she couldn’t now, no matter how much she thought of Ross making fun of her.
The theories made an odd sort of sense. The same kind of sense that most of Rome’s legends made. That it was founded by Romulus, that Peter the Apostle had founded a church in this place, so far away from Jerusalem that he had actually been buried here.
Yet the past lived in Rome, more than in any other place she had ever been. If someone—something—were to phase in and out of time, this would be the place, because time was strange here. Old and new and forward and backward all at once.
It was, she privately believed, the reason her phone did not work well here, although it worked well in Paris and London and Berlin. Those cities had history, yes, but they were modern. They had a twenty-first-century feeling, clearly built on the foundations of the past, not dwelling within the past.
She shook her head, gathered her stuff, and stopped long enough to buy herself a Coke. A cold, sweet example of the modern era.
She carried it outside, stopping at the door like she had the night before, watching the girl inside shut down her computer. No screen capture this time. Maybe it hadn’t mattered. Maybe just the waif was trying to steal information.
Maybe Condi had imagined all of it.
All of it except the Dark Man.
And Giuseppe, who waited for her in his usual spot, looking a bit shaken himself, somewhat vulnerable.
Now was the time to dissect the experience, to share perspectives.
She needed to talk to someone. And Giuseppe, at least, would listen.
Even if he was one of the crazies.
Even if she was too.
