17
SEBASTIANO LAY IN BED, eyes tightly closed, listening to the darkness. On many nights, he waited until his roommates were asleep so that he could have quiet conversations with Pagliaccio without them overhearing. Tonight, for the first time in months, he did not have his best friend lying beside him. Skin prickling with the heat of anxiety, he listened closely as first Giovanni and then Carmelo fell back to sleep. Carmelo snored lightly, while Giovanni only sighed from time to time, but these were the sounds of their slumber.
Taking a deep breath, mustering his courage, Sebastiano slipped stealthily from his bed and padded across the room. The floorboards were cold beneath the thinning fabric of his socks. In the hallway, he avoided the spot just outside his room where the floor sagged and creaked, knowing that the noise could not be interpreted as anything other than someone slinking about in the night.
A light cough from the staircase froze him in his tracks. Holding his breath, he waited to see if someone was climbing the steps, but there came no creak or scuff of footfalls. Treading even more carefully, he crossed to the balustrade at the top of the steps and peeked warily over the rail. Down on the second-floor landing, someone had placed a chair. He could see just the edge of the black fabric of a nun’s habit, and he knew that Sister Veronica had not gone to bed and was watching over them all.
A rush of alarm passed through him. How would he reach the basement without drawing her attention?
Then he remembered the servants’ steps, the narrow stairwell at the northern end of the building, which the children were forbidden from using. They went all the way to the back kitchen behind the large dining hall. Sebastiano did not know the time, and that worried him. Before sunrise, Sister Maria and Sister Franca would be in that large kitchen, preparing breakfast for the orphans and the other nuns, but surely morning was too far off for them to have already arrived.
Heart racing, Sebastiano hurried down the corridor. The door to Father Gaetano’s room yawed open, but he knew the priest was not there. A silver glow of moonlight illuminated the empty bed, and he could see bloodstains on the pillow, crimson that appeared black in the gloom.
He had made it nearly to that forbidden door at the end of the hall when he heard a scuff on the floor behind him. Turning, feeling so vulnerable without Pagliaccio in his hands, he saw that he was not alone. Marcello had emerged from his room. At first his expression was lost in shadows, but the older boy took a few steps and then Sebastiano could see the confusion and anger in Marcello’s face.
“What are you doing?” the boy whispered.
Sebastiano put a finger to his lips. “Please,” he said, so quietly it could barely have been called a whisper.
Marcello blinked hard, as if trying to clear his vision, and then shook his head.
“You’re crazy, do you know that?”
Sebastiano looked worriedly down the hall toward the stairs, but there was no sign that Sister Veronica had heard, no sound to indicate she might be on her way, so he focused on Marcello.
“Please just go back to sleep,” he begged. “I just want Pagliaccio. I don’t care what happens to the others, but Father Gaetano—”
“You’re worried about getting in trouble?” Marcello asked. “Don’t be stupid. If you go down into the basement alone, with those things there…”
“They’re not evil. They’re whatever we make them. Please, Marcello, he’s my best friend. And he’s never done anything to you, or to anyone else. He’s all I have.”
Marcello glanced at the floor, but not before Sebastiano had seen the pain in his eyes. They both knew what it felt like to lose everyone you loved. He turned to look back the way Sebastiano had come, as if he might shout for help. Finally, he glared at Sebastiano again.
“You’re not afraid? To be down there with them?”
“After Luciano put them in the box and stored them in the basement, they were … I don’t know, asleep?” Sebastiano said. “And they didn’t wake up until Father Gaetano brought them up and started to use them again.”
Marcello had gone pale. Now he swallowed and gave a single nod.
“Keep it away from me, though. I don’t even want to see it. Not at lunch or dinner, not sticking from your pocket. Nothing.”
Sebastiano laughed in relief, grabbing Marcello in a loose embrace.
“Thank you,” he whispered.
He left Marcello standing in the hall as he opened the tall, narrow backstairs door, and went into the deeper darkness. In the cramped stairwell, wood groaned with each step, but he did not falter. There was no other way down.
* * *
FATHER GAETANO SAT in the small kitchen, across the table from Sister Teresa. He cupped a mug of coffee in his hands, staring at the small swirls that the cream had left on the surface. He had taken only a sip or two, just enjoying the heat in his hands, but now it had begun to cool and the idea of drinking it was less than appetizing.
“Is it evil, this magic?” she asked.
The sister had believed right away. She had Sister Veronica’s word for what had happened upstairs, and that of the boy who had been sent to fetch her, and that of Father Gaetano himself. Though these things were patently impossible, she believed in them without having seen. She had faith in those around her.
“I don’t know,” he confessed. “This Luciano, the caretaker … was he a good man?”
“I believe he was.”
“Then perhaps evil is not the word. Perhaps our Lucifer has nothing to do with the Devil, and little Sebastiano is right—they are just what I made them. But even so, they are an abomination. Life that was not bestowed by the Lord can be nothing else.”
Father Gaetano looked up at her. Sister Teresa had taken a few minutes to compose herself and don her habit before rushing to the orphanage, but several strands of her hair had not been captured beneath her coif. That tiny evidence of disarray kept drawing his attention, leading him to unwelcome thoughts of her in her nightgown, hurrying to dress, leaving a mess of her bed. Now he glanced at her, caught her watching his face, and wondered if she sensed how much those few strands of hair distracted him, how much they suggested to him.
Was this God testing him, or the Devil gnawing at his heart with temptation?
Neither. Regardless of what he had been taught, or what might be expected of him, Gaetano had come to realize that a priest was only a man, that the vows he had taken were a choice, and simply speaking the words did not make him less susceptible to the yearnings of the heart.
He searched her eyes and saw a skittishness there that made him want to take her in his arms and protect her from the unknown and the impossible.
“There’s something I need to say to you.”
She sat very still. “No.”
Father Gaetano shifted in his chair, brow knitting as he studied her. “No? You don’t even know what I was—”
He still held his mug in both hands, and now she covered them with her own. Her touch silenced him.
“Do you think I’m blind?” she asked, her voice a sigh. “Do you think I don’t feel, that I’m carved from stone? I have promised myself to God, taken vows to my Lord and to my order. If you speak the things that are in your heart, I fear you may destroy us both.”
She sat back, withdrawing her touch, and his hands felt cold without hers upon them.
“Hold your tongue, Father,” she said. “For God’s sake, and for mine, if not for your own. Hold your tongue.”
Her sadness only made her more beautiful. The conflict in her eyes broke his heart, even as he steeled himself against such feelings. He might have been willing to compromise himself, to destroy the life he had made and the dreams that his mother had had for him, but he would not be so selfish as to do the same to her.
“I’m sorry,” he said.
“I feel I ought to be,” she said, “and yet I can’t bring myself to regret feeling this way. It’s innocent enough. Human enough. And I will cherish the memory of it. Anything more would be…”
She tilted her head, looking to him for something—understanding, perhaps.
“Yes,” he said, and that was all. He felt somehow deflated, his chest hollow. Tomorrow or the next day, he suspected he would feel differently, that he could bolster his spirits with faith and let God fill the empty spaces inside of him.
But not tonight.
“A strange conversation to be having in the small hours of the morning, in the aftermath of something so … incredible,” she said.
“Insidious,” he replied. “Evil or not, it is insidious.”
“I have always believed in the power of God, and I have felt the influence of evil in the world around us, but I never thought that magic—the sort that could be wielded by men—existed outside of storybooks.”
Father Gaetano sipped his coffee. It had turned cold and bitter.
“Funny,” he said. “I’ve always been convinced that tales from storybooks exist to warn us, to put us on our guard against the horrors that can result from man attempting to tap into powers we are not meant to hold, or peer into shadows we should never behold.”
“It all seems so surreal,” Sister Teresa said.
Father Gaetano gave that a moment’s thought. “Everything about this night seems surreal.”
Sister Teresa slid her chair back and went to grab the coffee pot, but she paused at the counter and looked back at him.
“Do you think Sebastiano is sleeping yet?” she asked. “It makes me uneasy, knowing those things are here in the building.”
“He may have had a difficult time dozing,” Father Gaetano said. “I know I would have. Have another cup if you’d like, and then I’ll go down and stoke the furnace with those damned puppets.”
She held the coffee pot toward him. “And you? Another?”
Father Gaetano still had the cold, bitter taste in his mouth. He slid his cup away from him.
“No, thank you. I’ve had enough. But I’ll keep you company for a few more minutes,” he said as he tapped a cigarette from the pack that Sister Franca had given him. He put it to his lips, lit a match, and fired the tip of the cigarette, then stared at the burning match as he drew in his first lungful of smoke.
“Then I’ll go down and put them in the furnace, and hope that they don’t scream while they burn.”