Giovanni insists on driving the moped the rest of the way into the city. I don’t argue. My heart still pounds in my ears, drowning out the tinny whirr of the motor. My hands—now grasped tightly to Giovanni’s T-shirt—still tremble.
I can’t stop replaying what almost happened. The truck’s blaring horn. The way the moped tilted beneath my legs, hanging in midair for seconds that seemed to last hours. The ground rushing at my face . . .
I shiver and lean closer to Giovanni. We didn’t crash. That’s all that matters.
The bike starts to shake as the road beneath us switches from packed dirt to well-worn cobblestone. Most of the storefronts have already gone dark, but I can still see sausages and cured meats dangling behind the windows, and I can imagine how, in the mornings, the fresh produce must shine with dew beneath the striped awnings. I can taste burnt sugar in the air, but I can’t tell where it’s coming from until we speed past the darkened windows of a bakery.
Giovanni steers us through the winding streets, slowing to shout “Buonasera!” at strolling passersby and pointing things out to me as we ride by.
“There, that is the best espresso in all of Italia.” He lifts a hand, pointing to a café that has already closed for the day. A thick padlock hangs from the front door, and wooden folding chairs lean against the walls, but the air still smells of deep, rich coffee. “If you ever want a gelato that tastes like it was made in heaven, you have to go there. Promise me?”
The faster he talks, the more pronounced his accent gets. I say, “I promise.”
He flicks his hand at me, as though my promise means nothing. “I will take you. Tomorrow, maybe. You will love it.”
I can’t help smiling as I bury my face into his neck. We speed past a general store with wicker baskets and bunches of fresh basil hanging from the roof. I can see piles of juicy red tomatoes and deep purple eggplant just inside. Giovanni shouts something in Italian to the old woman in the window. She flashes him a wide, toothless smile. And then she looks at me, and her expression darkens.
“Diavolina,” she mutters, shaking her head. Her left eye is lazy, the dark pupil drifting toward her cheek, but the right eye focuses in on my face.
Giovanni shakes his head, laughing under his breath. “Crazy old woman.”
“What did she call me?”
Giovanni slows his moped to a crawl. “It’s just a name the old women here call pretty American girls. Means nothing.”
We take another tight turn, brick buildings blocking us in on either side. This part of town looks grimier than the rest of Cambria. Clotheslines crisscross the sky above me, stiff, stained towels fluttering in the wind. A sickly looking goat leans against one of the walls. The curved lines of its ribs are clearly defined beneath patchy spots of fur.
At the bottom of the hill, Giovanni cuts the engine and climbs off the moped, offering me his hand. I hesitate. The air down here doesn’t smell of sugar and coffee. It smells damp, rotten. Weeds creep up through the cracks in the street. The houses surrounding us look destitute. Half the buildings are boarded up. It’s not that late at night, but the windows are all dark.
“Where are we?” I ask, tentatively sliding off the moped.
“This is a famous neighborhood.” Giovanni presses one hand into my lower back. “You see that?”
He points at a hill towering over the grimy neighborhood, its shadow casting this part of Cambria in utter darkness. I crane my head back to stare up at it, remembering how Harper and Mara and I walked past the spot earlier today. “That’s where Lucia was sacrificed, right?”
“You know our history,” Giovanni says, impressed. He snakes both arms around my waist, pulling me into his chest. He’s tall enough to rest his chin on top of my head. “Some people say that if you walk there at night, you still hear her screaming.”
A breeze blows down the narrow street, chilling the sweat on my arms. I shiver and lean into Giovanni. “Let’s talk about something else.”
“You don’t like our famous story?” He kisses the top of my head. “Most American girls love hearing about Lucia. She lived here, in this neighborhood, you know, a very long time ago.”
I wrinkle my nose as I glance around the grimy neighborhood, filled with broken-down buildings. “It isn’t very nice, is it?”
Giovanni chuckles under his breath. “No, it is not the pretty Italia American girls like to see. But come over here. Let me show you something.”
Giovanni moves his hand from my waist and heads down a narrow alley. The road is steep, the moon blocked by high walls, leaving the space all in shadow. Water crawls down the bricks, dripping. The sound seems to take longer than it should to reach my ears.
My palms have started to sweat. Giovanni leads me halfway down a dark stairwell. I open my mouth, trying to come up with some excuse to go back home, when he takes me by the shoulders and turns me toward the wall. My words die in my throat.
It’s not a wall—it’s a tunnel, hidden from the street by the angle of the staircase and closed off by a spiky black gate. A brass plaque hangs above it, the Italian words obscured by years of dirt.
“What is this?” I breathe, awed.
“Our catacombs. We buried our dead here after the famine.” Giovanni’s voice bounces off the walls, then distorts, and continues echoing until it doesn’t sound like his voice at all. He reaches through the gate, unlatches something with a click, and pushes it open, hinges creaking. “Would you like to go see?”
The hairs on my arms stand on end. No, I think. I most definitely do not want to see where Cambria’s dead are buried, thank you very much.
But I find myself taking a step forward.
The tunnel twists away from the main street, disappearing into perfect darkness. There’s a sound like scuffling in the dirt. Rats.
I shrink backward. Maybe it’s my imagination, but I swear I can see the light reflecting off their tiny red eyes.
Giovanni puts a hand on my back. “This is the spookiest place in all of Italy. You are not curious?”
I swallow. I am curious, obviously. The feeling gnaws at me, even as fear creeps over my skin, making my hair stand on end. I take another step into the darkness. And then another.
The tunnel dips lower, and a few crumbling stone stairs appear. I don’t hear the scuffling of rats anymore. Maybe we scared them away. Or maybe they’re hiding in the corners. Waiting. The thought sends an icy shiver up my spine.
After another few steps, a stone archway curves over us, marking the proper entrance to the catacombs. It’s colder here than it should be. Colder than the rest of the city by at least ten degrees. It smells different, too. Rich, like earth and . . . something else. Something pungent that I can’t quite put my finger on.
The darkness seems to pulse. I squint, but this darkness is different from what I’m used to. It’s the darkness of a place that’s never once been touched by sunlight.
I take a step forward, lowering my fingertips to the walls. They’re strange, bumpy, and covered in dust. I move my hands over ridges and crests. There’s an open space, like the opening of a very small jar, and then more bumps, something jagged—
I hear a spark behind me, and red light flares up. I cringe at the sudden brightness, blinking. Giovanni has a lighter out, the flame dancing between his fingers. I squint, and the wall comes into focus.
Skulls. Hundreds of them.
They line the walls, stacked one on top of another, starting at the floor and towering all the way to the ceiling, the white bone gone yellow with age. Their dark eyeholes stare out at me, blank and unseeing. Their jagged mouths are broken into permanent grins.
My hand rests on a cheekbone, fingers stretched toward empty eye sockets.
“Oh God!” I jerk my hand away, the skin on the back of my neck crawling. The space seems suddenly airless. I realize that the smell I noticed before, the one I couldn’t place, must be human flesh. Long-decayed human flesh.
I must’ve started shaking, because Giovanni wraps his arms around me. “Bella, bella, no. Do not be frightened.” He kisses me on top of my head, rocking me like I’m a child.
“I thought they’d be underground,” I choke out, fighting against the nausea rising in my throat. “Like, buried.”
“It is okay. We can leave now.”
I nod and cover my mouth and nose with one hand, but that doesn’t make it any better. The smell is still there, pressing against me, creeping up my nostrils. I think I’m going to be sick. I keep my eyes straight ahead as we make our way through the twisting underground tunnels. I try to pretend I can’t see the skulls’ vacant eyes and broken teeth.
I swear I can hear footsteps down here with us, whispers echoing through the bones.
Giovanni keeps one hand pressed to my back, leading me through the catacombs to another entrance, this one far away from where we came down initially. For a second I wonder how big the catacombs are, but then the darkness opens into a wide square, different from where we entered. We take the small stone stairs two at a time.
Buildings rise around us, grass and wildflowers growing over forgotten staircases, dripping from long-darkened windows. The air here smells blissfully, wonderfully fresh after the catacombs. It’s like drinking cool water. The moon hangs directly above, bathing the space in silver.
I turn around and swat Giovanni on the shoulder. “You rat. Why would you take me down there?”
He cringes, like I actually hurt him. “I am so sorry. Most American girls love our catacombs.”
“Really? Or do you love making them scream and go all helpless?”
“Maybe.” He shrugs, smiling that devilish smile that curls only one side of his mouth, flashing the tips of perfectly white teeth. For a moment, I forget how creeped out I am. I feel like my knees might crumple beneath me.
“Well. I am not most girls.”
“Of course not. You are special.”
I stop and tilt my head up, looking around. We’re in a large piazza. The buildings here aren’t all crumbling brick, like they are in the rest of the town. Instead, I’m surrounded by old stone and whitewashed plaster. The structures look mystical bathed in the silver moonlight. I turn in place, awed, drinking everything in. A massive tower stands at one end of the square, jutting into the sky. It looks like a castle. A marble sculpture of a man astride a horse stands at the other end of the square.
But despite the place’s beauty, it’s empty. The storefronts have been shuttered, and there’s no laundry hanging from the windows. The rest of Cambria smells like bread and coffee and sugar, but the air here smells like nothing. It’s completely deserted.
Giovanni leads me to a large stone fountain in the middle of the square, long ago run dry. Weeds crawl up around the stone, and rocks and debris fill the basin.
“Where are we?” I stop in front of the fountain and run my fingers over the stone. It’s still warm from the day’s heat.
“It used to be our main piazza, but the shops all closed many years ago.” Giovanni nods to the boarded-up storefronts surrounding the square. “There’s been talk of getting the businesses to come back here, now that we have all the students from CART spending their summers here and spending money, but that will take years. It is beautiful, no?”
I nod, feeling a little wistful that I never got to see it in its prime, with shoppers bustling around the square, buying fabulous leather purses and fresh produce from the tiny shops. I think, sadly, of the sterile outdoor shopping center down the street from my house—a Barnes & Noble, a Starbucks, and a J.Crew arranged prettily around concrete fountains and perfectly landscaped greenery. It’s a pale imitation of this colorful stone square covered in ivy. “We’ve tried to build places like this in America, but they never look the same.”
Giovanni makes a noise at the back of his throat. “You Americans do not understand architecture. Your buildings are so boring.”
I nod, agreeing. “Have you ever been?”
“Ah, no. I do not go to other places.” He picks up a rock and tosses it into the fountain. “I am happy here, in Italy. There is good food, good people.”
“You don’t want to travel?”
“No, not so much. I want to finish school. Get a good job.”
I didn’t know he was in school. “What are you studying?”
“Business, mostly. A little of this, a little of that.” He shrugs with one shoulder. “Cambria is a poor place. It is hard to make money here, except for tourism. That is okay for now, but . . . I want to open a little shop in a piazza like this. Sell things to tourists.”
“In Cambria?”
“Maybe. Who knows? The rest of my family has moved to Florence. I think I will go there, too, someday. That way I can help support them.”
I want to ask him more about this shop he plans to open, but he puts a hand on my arm, nodding toward the fountain. “Sit with me.”
I lower myself to the fountain with him. It might be my imagination, but parts of the stone look darker than others, like they’ve been stained by something rust-colored.
Blood, I think, my mind going back to the catacombs. I shiver and wrap my arms around myself.
“It’s weird that there’s no one else here,” I say, trying to take my mind off those twisting walls of bones. Giovanni gives my hand a squeeze.
“There will be. Tomorrow night is our Festival for the Dead. It is the anniversary of Lucia’s sacrifice. People come to us from all over Europe to celebrate and dance. There is music. Wine. Will you come?”
I peek up at him through the fan of my eyelashes, head tilted toward the ground. “Sounds spooky.”
“Do not worry, bella. I will protect you.” He kisses the skin behind my ear.
“Do the dead crash the party?” I murmur, my eyes fluttering closed.
“No, no. In Cambria the dead are very well behaved.”
His mouth travels down my neck and over my collarbone. I moan, leaning closer. Giovanni wraps his arms behind my back and burrows his face in my hair.
“You are so beautiful,” he says, and it reminds me of the night we met. Our first kiss. I tilt my head up, and our lips meet.
“You are so beautiful,” I say, my words getting lost in his mouth. In an instant, I forget why I thought this place was creepy. The darkness, the seclusion . . . it’s romantic. Our own private hideaway, accessible only by walking through a tunnel of the dead. Giovanni tightens his arms around me. Kisses me harder until, eventually, I forget the catacombs completely.
I think about the kisses. I can still feel Giovanni’s arms twisting around my shoulders, the heat of his chest pressed to mine. I touch a finger to my mouth, trying to remember the warmth of his lips. My eyes flutter close, and my breath catches . . .
A fly buzzes past my ear, the sound of its wings a low drone. I flinch and jerk away, and my bad ankle twists beneath me, sending pain up my leg.
“Nice one,” I mutter to myself, cringing. The last memories of Giovanni’s kisses disappear as I hobble the rest of the way home.
It’s late when I finally get back to the apartment. I try the doorknob, expecting to find it locked. Harper and Mara couldn’t have gotten back from Professor Coletti’s yet. But the knob turns easily beneath my hand.
I ease the door open as quietly as possible. I listen for voices but hear nothing. They must’ve already gone to bed. I take my shoes off and place them next to the door and then creep down the hallway, rolling my feet from heel to ball to keep the floorboards from creaking.
I push my bedroom door open, expecting Lucky to leap off my bed and rub his furry body against my ankles. He’s been sleeping on my pillow when I’m not here.
Instead, I’m hit with the smell of something sharp and rotting. I cover my nose with one hand. It takes a second to find the lamp switch, and then a dull, golden glow blinks on.
Someone tore the sheets back from my bed. They ripped my pillows apart, leaving a downy layer of feathers over every inch of my room. A breeze drifts in from the window, stirring them in small drifts.
But that’s not the worst part. Whoever did this left me a message.
Diavolina.
The word is painted across my sheets in thick, spiky letters, written in something the color of rust, only thicker, and tacky. Flies buzz in through the open window and land on the soiled sheets, wings flicking, crawling over each other. Their eyes look iridescent in the glow of my lamp.
I stare at the sheets for a long time, hand still balled at my nose, eyes watering, until I understand.
The flies. The smell. The tacky, rust-colored paint.
The message was written in blood.