Page 42 of In the Garden of Monsters

He loves you, it said again.Love you, love you, love you...The whispers swirled around me.

“Go away,” I hissed.

Silence.

Lightning flashed again, and mercifully, I could see no one in the room with me. I was getting out of the tub when the power returned. Quickly, I stood and grabbed my robe, wrapping it tightly around myself.

Don’t...The whisper was loud in my ear.

I put my hand on the door handle.

Don’t let them...destroy you.

I pushed the door open, only to find Ignazio walking down the hall toward me. My heart began to pound hard. I held my clothes tightly against me, making sure the bathrobe didn’t reveal too much.

“How was your bath?” he asked. I hated that his husky voice was so delicious to my ears.

Lightning flashed again at the window on the stairway landing. “I don’t like bathing with such a storm raging.” My voice shook.

“I won’t let anything hurt you, Julia,” Ignazio said, stopping a few paces from me. It seemed he had forgiven me for refusing him earlier. “Worry not.” He gazed past me, out the window, and his eyes took on a briefly vacant look. “The thunder will pass soon.”

“You sound so sure of that.”

“I am.” He nodded as though I had just passed some sort of evaluation. “We still have time.”

“Time for what?”

“Time until dinner,” he said, flashing me his heart-melting smile.

“Ah, that,” I said, though I had the distinct feeling that he was referring to something else.

He reached out a hand and cupped my cheek. I froze, unsure of what to do. Instinct told me to rip my body away, but everything about his touch seduced me into ignoring any warning bells. I thought he might lean forward and press his lips to mine, but then he was gone, down the stairs, leaving me shivering in my robe in the dim hallway.

He loves you...

I ran from the voice, slamming the door to my room behind me. As I lay down on my bed, struggling to catch my breath, I tried to make sense of the messages I was hearing. If the ghosts were from my past lives, what could that mean? Who was sending them here? They were incomplete and often faint. I was the only one who seemed to be hearing them. What were they warning me about?

Unable to make heads or tails of this eeriness, I found the courage to dress and go down the hall to the library. As I’d hoped, Paolo stood by the window, staring into the valley beyond.

“Sometimes, when I look at the garden at night, I see a green glow,” I said as I approached him.

He turned to me, then looked back at the garden and pointed.“Come quello?”

I looked out the window. It wasn’t night, but the storm clouds had cloaked theboschettoin darkness, and emanating from the Sacro Bosco was a sickly green light. It played at the edges of thetempiettoand seeped up through the trees.

“You see it, too?”

“Sì.This is the first time.”

“Then I’m not imagining things.” Relief filled me.

We stared at the glow for a few moments before it abruptly winked out.

“What do you think it is?” I asked in a low voice.

He looked at me for some time before responding. “I think there is something down there—something not from our world.”

Three days earlier, I would have laughed at such a thought, but after everything I had experienced since arriving in Bomarzo, it seemed as plausible an explanation as any. I sat on the couch, and he joined me, taking Giulia’s journal and another slim volume out of his bag. He put the journal back and thumbed through the book.La storia di Bomarzowas etched into the spine.The History of Bomarzo.

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