Page 68 of In the Garden of Monsters

I heard the ghost but didn’t look up. Thinking back to the vision of me in the empire-waist dress from a couple of days past, three fingers outstretched, it dawned on me. Every time I had seen my ghost, it had held up three fingers. Suddenly, I understood what the visions were trying to tell me. I placed two arancini on a plate and turned to Ignazio, my heart pounding with desperation, desire, and no small amount of fear. “You’ll join us for lunch, will you not?” I asked.

He visibly brightened but shook his head. “Thank you, Julia, but I must not.”

“You must,” I insisted. “We enjoyed the game with you last night, so why not today? And it is only fitting that you enjoy a meal with us after you have done so much to make this week so...special.” I struggled with the last word—there were no words to describe our time in Bomarzo.

Gala took my bait, as I hoped she would. “Yes, you must stay.” She took Ignazio by the arm and sat him down between us. A jolt of heat went through me as his knee brushed up against mine.

“Here,” I said, handing him the plate before he could say no. “Take one.”

He began to rise, but Gala pulled him back down. “Stay, please.”

I took his other arm and echoed Gala. “Yes, please stay.”

Lillian added her voice into the mix. “Please, as the others said, we’d love for you to stay.”

“The ladies rule the room.” Jack laughed.

Ignazio turned his head and looked at me.

“For me,” I said, barely loud enough for anyone to hear. Boldly, I pressed my knee against his.

I felt him soften. “Very well, Julia. But I’m not hungry.”

Gala glared at me, recognizing that he had decided to stay because of me.

Jack and Gala raised their arancini, and we all followed suit. I glanced at Ignazio. Our eyes connected, and for a moment, I was lost, wishing the rest of our companions were no longer there, that it was just us, alone to dine upon each other.

I examined the golden rice ball in my hand. If I ate it, I would be consuming my fifth pomegranate seed. Paolo and I had already determined that if there really was some curse upon the Julias of this place, it would manifest after I’d eaten the sixth seed. But if my theory was right and I could get Ignazio to eat a seed as well, it might be worth it. I took a bite and swallowed.

As the taste of thearancinofilled my mouth, a strange sensation overcame me, a mysterious pull into the shadows of my own mind. I saw myself strolling through grand, torch-lit corridors, the walls lined with black marble and hung with dark tapestries depicting scenes of an unworldly splendor. I wandered through shadowy gardens filled with twisted, thorny vines and blossoms that exuded a heady perfume. The air was cool and tinged with the scent of damp earth, echoing faintly with the murmurs of unseen rivers. An inexplicable joy surged through me, a contentment in the darkness that was profound and enveloping, yet bewildering. The place was both beautiful and foreboding, a palace that was at once my sanctuary and a maze hiding secrets.

A chill tingled my skin as the vision receded, leaving me at the table with a lingering sense of having touched something ancient and profound. I looked around, slightly disoriented, my heart filled with an odd yearning for the dark splendor I had glimpsed.

“Your turn, Ignazio,” I egged him on. Leaning toward him, I brought anotherarancino,a pomegranate seed embedded within, to his mouth. He didn’t turn away. The rice ball touched his lips, and he bit it and swallowed, closing his eyes.

This time, the earthquake’s grip was immediate and violent. But as the world shook around us, something peculiar happened. Ignazio seized my hand, and it was as if we were not simply fleeing the chaos, but directing it. The ground quaked beneath our feet, yet it moved with us, not against us. We rushed out from theorco, and the earth roared around us, a symphony of destruction nearly deafening in its intensity.

I was terrified, but I couldn’t shake the sensation that Ignazio and I were somehow at the center of the tempest, like puppet masters pulling at unseen strings. A long crack opened in front of us, an unsettling dance of destruction, its edges grinding and shifting as if beckoning us closer. It was as if the chasm was a mouth, and we were both its voice and audience. Trees shivered, chestnuts pelted the ground, and yet, amid the pandemonium, a pomegranate rolled to a gentle stop at my feet, a symbol of something I couldn’t quite grasp.

Down the path, it seemed Ceres’s eyes flashed bright green for the barest second, but I could not be sure. I stared at the statue, but there was no movement, only cold stone.

“Are you all right?” Ignazio’s voice was tender in my ear, yet laden with something I couldn’t identify.

I nodded and reluctantly pulled away from the comforting heat of his arms and our inexplicable connection, the magnetic pull that had briefly united us with the chaos.

“Now do you believe us about the earthquake we felt the other day?” Jack asked Gala, his eyes wide with the remnants of terror and confusion.

Paolo slowly went toward the place where the crack had been, Lillian in tow. “It’s gone,” he said. “As though it was never there.”

“All of this is very Dalínian,” Dalí cried out. “Even the ants declare it so.” He pointed at the earth. Instead of a crack, there was a growing line of dark ants.

“Death marches forward,” Gala breathed.

Dalí waved his cane in the air. “Our mortality is evident. Impermanence is all around us.”

“So, ants mean death?” Jack asked.

“Sì! Sì!Or sometimes they mean overwhelming sexual desire.” The artist winked at me.

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