The Devil Will Come

for centuries, they reckoned, so what was the rush?

Elisabetta didn’t share this sense of torpor. Over at Piazza Mastai her classes were being taught without her! Sister Marilena had taken them over so the children were being well-served – that wasn’t the biggest problem. This assignment was a schism, a rip through the fabric of her soul, for all the sinister fascination it held for her now. The patterns of her day had a purpose, all to serve God. For the first time in a dozen years she’d been tipped from her gently rocking lifeboat and cast into an unfamiliar sea.

The books and papers on her desk were from a different time, a different Elisabetta. She recognized her own handwriting, remembered the marginalia she’d made but they seemed alien to her. She resented them, resented Professor De Stefano and resented the staff at the Institute. To her mind, they were players in a conspiracy to pluck her away from the things she loved. Even the clergy at the Institute seemed like inhabitants of a parallel universe with missions different from her own. The nuns were more like clock-watching secretaries, the priests smelled of cigarettes and talked about TV shows in the lunch room. She had to finish this job of hers, whatever it was, and return to precious normalcy.

Elisabetta was thumbing through her old copy of Manilius’s Astronomica when she felt a sudden need to shut everything out and pray silently.

She closed her eyes and clutched the cross hanging from her neck, hard enough to hurt her hand which already ached frequently from her old palm laceration. ‘Dear Lord, I lost all thoughts of myself and that of my old life when I abandoned myself to your divine spirit. I yielded my heart to the power of your love. That heart which was almost pierced by an assassin’s knife, that heart now belongs to you. I offer up my actions, my trials, my sufferings that my entire being may be employed in loving, honoring and glorifying you. It is my irrevocable will to belong entirely to you, to live and die as one of your devoted servants. Please let nothing disturb my deep peace. Heal my heart from impurity. Amen.’

Before Elisabetta could reopen her eyes, disturbing images began to invade her thoughts like unwelcome visitors. Pictures of partially mummified bodies with bony tails wafted through her mind.

Then she was seized by a flash, a painful memory she’d all but blocked from consciousness: the half-naked backside of the man who’d stabbed her, that thing protruding from his spine, ringed by small black tattoos looking for all the world like a swarm of angry insects.

That thing. It was a tail, wasn’t it?

Suddenly woozy, she exhaled, unaware that she’d been holding her breath.

It was as if she’d always known.

Elisabetta felt small and vulnerable, a sparrow in a hurricane. God was inside her; He was all around her. But for the first time in a very long while she craved the warm sanctuary of a physical embrace.

‘Are you coming?’

Elisabetta heard Marco’s impatient baritone through the bathroom door. ‘Yes!’ she shouted back.

‘You said “yes” ten minutes ago. We’re going to be late.’

‘This time I mean it.’

She put the finishing touches on her eye make-up and stood as far back as she could in an attempt to turn her reflection in the mirror over the sink into something more full-length. She liked her new dress. It was red and summery and it made her look especially shapely. She only needed to pick out a necklace, something nice and long, to show off her cleavage.

She opened the door and watched the impatience melt from Marco’s face. ‘That was worth waiting for,’ he said. ‘Look at you!’

She asked if he liked the dress and he responded by running his big hands over the silky fabric and up her stockings.

Elisabetta laughed and pulled away. ‘I thought you said we were going to be late.’

‘It’s only my cousin’s wedding. I don’t even like him.’

‘Well, I’m not going to let you mess up my dress and make-up. Not to mention your new suit – which looks really good, by the way.’

Marco checked himself out in the hallway mirror. ‘You think so?’

‘Yes, I think so. You’re going to make the girls go crazy.’

‘They can’t have me,’ he said, lightly. ‘I’m spoken for.’

‘For that, I’ll kiss you, but later. I’ll be right back. I need to get a necklace.’

At that moment he stopped looking like a hulking man and took on the demeanor of a small, excited boy. He reached into his inside jacket pocket and removed a slim velvet box. ‘Maybe this will work.’

‘Marco, what have you done?’

She opened it and loved it immediately. It was a heart-shaped pendant on a gold chain, half the design done in pave diamonds, half in rubies.

‘You like it?’

‘Oh my God! I love it!’

She ran back into the bathroom to put it on and came out glowing.

‘It looks beautiful,’ he said. ‘Like you.’

‘Half is me, half is you,’ Elisabetta said. ‘Which am I, the diamonds or the rubies?’

‘Whichever you like.’

She took a couple of steps forward and turned her face upwards to his. He encircled her in his strong arms and tenderly squeezed her ribs. She closed her eyes, put her arms around his waist, and her ear against his heart, feeling as happy and secure as she’d ever been.

‘Am I disturbing you?’

Startled, Elisabetta opened her eyes. Professor De Stefano was at her door. ‘No, please come in.’

The old man looked apologetic. ‘I just wanted to make sure you had everything you needed.’

‘Yes, it’s all here,’ she said, composing herself. ‘My box of papers arrived this morning from my father’s flat. The computer seems to work.’

‘Do you need someone to help you with it?’

‘We have computers at the school, Professor. I’m quite proficient.’

‘Good, good. I’ll have my secretary give you access to my files of photographs from the site.’

‘That would be useful,’ Elisabetta said.

De Stefano lingered. ‘Do you have a plan?’ he asked abruptly. ‘I know it’s only your first full day and I wouldn’t press you, but I’ve already had calls this morning from the Vatican. They’re anxious for a report.’

She tapped on her copy of Astronomica. ‘I’m thinking about the symbols. I want to try to understand their meaning, the significance they may have had to these … beings. And I need to understand the phenomenon better – the tails.’

De Stefano nodded vigorously. ‘Yes, this is critical. We need to solve this mystery quickly. Who were these people? How did they come to be in this place? How did they die? By fire? Were they murdered? If so, who was responsible? Was it mass suicide? If so, why did they do it? What do their tails and their symbology tell us about who they were? Were they Romans? Were they pagans? Is there even the remotest possibility that they could have been Christians? It’s going to be impossible to prevent the public from finding out about this forever. These things always leak. I only hope that we have some credible explanations to offer if it comes out before the Conclave starts or while it’s in session. I’ll leave you to it. But let me know as soon as you’ve made progress.’ His voice had a pleading tone.

She opened the small volume to a bookmark. Marcus Manilius was a Roman astrologer whose life straddled the reigns of Augustus and Tiberius, a figure who would have been lost to the sands of time were it not for his epic poem Astronomica, intended to teach the art of the zodiac to his contemporaries.

Nor did man’s reason set bound or limit to its activities until it scaled the skies, grasped the innermost secrets of the world by its understanding of their causes, and beheld all that anywhere exists. It perceived why clouds were shaken and shattered by so loud a crash; why winter’s snowflakes were softer than summer’s hail; why volcanoes blazed with fire and the solid earth quaked; why rain poured down and what cause set the winds in motion. After reason had referred these several happenings to their true causes, it ventured beyond the atmosphere to seek knowledge of the neighboring vastness of heaven and comprehend the sky as a whole; it determined the shapes and names of the signs, and discovered what cycles they experienced according to fixed law, and that all things moved to the will and disposition of heaven, as the constellations by their varied array