by Nick Gevers
The waif, with her big brown eyes, round cheeks, black-black hair, looked like a cute Italian kid straight out of La Dolce Vita, or at least she did until you factored in the piercings, the tattoos, and the leather bus-tier, which seemed just too hot to wear in this strange 100-degree Roman autumn. Condi had already clocked out, leaving the screen on a UFO social networking site filled with wackos.
The waif always captured that last screen, missing the important stuff—or so Condi hoped. She tried to check her e-mail several times per day on her iPhone, but the AT&T connection in Rome was spotty at best—hell, all wireless connections were spotty here—and she was afraid she lost a lot of information.
She waited until the waif stopped checking the screen capture. Then Condi sighed and stepped onto the cobblestone street, heading up hill to the Via Sistina. Ahead, she could hear music and laughter. Behind her, she heard the whisper of shoes against cobblestones.
She didn’t have to turn around to know he was following her again.
She didn’t know his name or even what he wanted, but she did know what he looked like. Black hair, high cheekbones, traditional Roman features, all assembled into a classically handsome face, one that could’ve been stamped on a coin a thousand years before, although he was taller than the average Roman and had broader shoulders.
He’d shown up on her first morning in Rome, sitting behind one of the flower vendors on the Spanish Steps, and he’d been around ever since. He had watched her with an avid interest that would have unnerved her anywhere else.
But this was Italy, and Italian men were famously forward. In her first week here, she’d had her butt pinched several times. She’d had her breasts brushed—oh, scusi, signora—and one man had caught her in a wild 1940s V-E Day-style kiss.
She had shoved him away, threatening in her excellent Italian to cut off his privates, cook them in olive oil, and serve them to the pigs. That had gotten her applause and a bit of distance. The vendors nearby, and there were dozens, called her the Untouchable American, and had even started to consider her as something other than a tourist.
She knew better than to expect to be treated like an Italian. It handicapped her, but she had accepted that when she accepted the assignment, silently cursing the location of the phenomenon.
Anywhere but Rome, famous for its hatred of tourists, with its centuries-old secrets and its thousand-year-long lies.
That she had picked up one tail didn’t surprise her.
That she had picked up only one did.
Tavernas and (weirdly) gelato shops were open on the Via Sistina, sandwiched between shuttered clothing stores and restaurants. From the top of one of Rome’s famed Seven Hills, light flowed down, bringing with it the music and laughter she had heard on the side street.
The walk up the hill was steep, the sidewalk narrow. The walk at night was best—fewer pedestrians, fewer limousines—but had its own treacheries. She had learned, in her six weeks in Rome, to beware large groups. Usually they included their fair share of pick-pockets and thieves. Most locals looked the other way, figuring tourists got what they deserved.
The man behind her didn’t want to attack her. If he did, he would have done so weeks ago. He wanted to observe her, for reasons she didn’t want to think about.
She wished he wasn’t here tonight. Tonight was crucial to help her plan for tomorrow morning, and she didn’t want him to know what she was about.
The lights got brighter around the Intercontinental Hotel near the top of the hill. Two limousines were parked near the doorway, two doormen talking to the drivers as if they were all waiting for some VIPs to show up and show them around.
Just above them, on the Piazza Trinità dei Monti, sat the largest vendor cart Condi had seen in Rome. The cart was really a miniature market which sold everything from Gatorade to a cheap panino with the meat cooked right on the spot. The smell of grilled lamb filtered down to her now, and she wondered how the most expensive restaurant in the area—on the roof of the Hassler Hotel—liked the competition.
She stopped at the top of the hill, the city sprawled out before her. In the daylight, she could make out St. Paul’s Cathedral and all the other landmarks. At night, they faded into a series of domed lights at the top of the other hills, with less-defined lights leading up to them.
The artists had folded up their carts and the professional beggars were gone. One of the nearby restaurants had illegally moved its tables onto the Piazza so that the patrons could enjoy the warm night. A string quartet played Vivaldi.
The Steps themselves were well lit, the flowers in the pots alongside looking festive in the bright lights.
Below, she could see the Barcaccia Fountain, and the crowd around it, drunk and partying. The restaurants on the Piazza di Spagna were open late, catering to the tourists.
She ignored them. They would be gone in a few days, replaced by other tourists, also bent on drinking their way through the hot Italian nights.
She was more interested in the Steps themselves.
Built between 1723 and 1725 by Francesco de Sanctis, the Steps took their name from the Spanish Embassy, which had moved there in the nineteenth century and had since moved on. Locals sneered on the area because it had long been home to the expatriate English community in Rome, a community that had once included John Keats and several other famous British literary figures.
Condi had learned all she could about the Steps—how long they had been there, how they were actually paid for by the French who once owned the church at the hill’s top, the Church of Trinità dei Monti, which, so far as she could tell, was always closed.
She had walked up and down the travertine steps several times a day, always looking at one landing in particular, a place where none of the professional beggars ever set up shop, where tourists who normally sat down from exhaustion somehow never reclined despite a bit of shade.
She had several hundred photographs of that spot, some taken by tourists as far back as the 1920s, and some by professional photographers that were even older, going back to the invention of the box camera in the mid-nineteenth century.
Some photos were fascinating, some were not. Some were of the steps, glistening in the rain or gleaming in the sunshine, and some were of a dark form sprawled along them, looking like the black painted shadow of a body burned into the stone.
It had taken her months to figure out when the body appeared and when it disappeared. That had been part of her assignment—a crazy assignment that had come two days after the last paper she’d applied to reminded her that hundreds of reporters (even those with multiple investigative reporting awards) were out of work.
She had no idea how many of her unemployed colleagues had turned down work with the Organization of Strange Phenomena Ancient and Modern. Some days she liked to think she was the only reporter they had approached. Other days she wondered if she was the only reporter they had approached who had decided to check her integrity at the door.
Not that she had checked it entirely. She had told the Organization that she’d investigate any phenomenon they sent her to, but if she discovered a hoax—and frankly, she had said, I think they’re all going to be hoaxes—she would let them know. She wouldn’t sugar-coat anything, she wouldn’t lie about anything, and she wouldn’t spin facts just to support some conclusion they were paying her hundreds of thousands to confirm.
In her first six months with the Organization, she’d disproven a dozen so-called unexplainable occurrences. The one thing she’d learned as a reporter was that nothing was unexplainable. She just had to dig until she found the explanation, one that satisfied both her and her bosses.
Although standing at the edge of the Piazza Trinità dei Monti on the top of the Spanish Steps, she had a moment of doubt that she would ever find an explanation for the black form.
It was the first case that fascinated her. Reports of the form’s appearance started in the months before John Keats died in the building right next to the Steps. Supposedly, Kea
ts—ill with the consumption that would eventually kill him—looked out the house’s window and saw the black figure appear.
It is an omen, he told his companion Joseph Severn. I have seen Death. It awaits me, there, on those Steps.
Severn saw the figure as well, and thought it a cruel hoax, a drawing made by someone who wanted to frighten the superstitious English. Hours later, he reported in his journal, the figure was gone, destroyed by one of the many wintry downpours that helped demolish what remained of Keats’s health.
From that moment on, sightings of the black figure showed up in the literature and not always from English expatriates. Sometimes, the sightings showed up in the Italian press. Sometimes in travel journals of the very wealthy who had made Rome part of their continental tour.
Several artists—professionals as well as amateurs—added the figure into their paintings of the Steps. Sometimes the figure was part of a dark and sinister portrait, and sometimes it was the only black spot in the middle of a perfectly painted sunny day, complete with azaleas and beautiful women.
Even in the paintings, though, the figure was in the same position, sprawled along the steps, looking like nothing more than the shade of a dead man trapped for a moment in bright sunshine.
She had pored over all of the evidence—and thanks to the internet, there was a lot of it. She had found nearly two hundred years of paintings and photographs, amateur and professional, thousands of pages of diary and journal entries, plus every single mention in books about strange phenomenon published in every single language she could read.
She combined all of her data, and learned that the figure appeared with startling regularity. The average paranormal investigator never noticed because the appearances weren’t to the minute. The paranormal investigators found that the figure appeared roughly every ten years within a particular time frame, but none of them had taken the time (or maybe had lacked the ability) to do the math.
The figure appeared ten years, fifteen days, and thirty hours from the previous appearance. It remained visible for thirty minutes. Nothing seemed to change this pattern. In previous sightings, people had grabbed it (it felt like touching pitch, one traveler had written), shaken it, tried to pick it up (it didn’t budge, as if it were attached to the very step itself, wrote another traveler), and had poked it with various objects, including knives. Some had tried to light it on fire, and that hadn’t worked either.
In 1971, the height of what Condi privately called “the crazies,” paranormal investigators tried to slice bits off the figure. They had so-called psychics touch it, trying to get a reading, and they touched the figure with all kinds of things from thermometers to Geiger counters. They got nothing, no readings at all—and there should have been some kind of reading, even from a static state. The slices failed as well. The figure’s black essence broke the knives. Someone left the scene to get a battery-operated meat cutter, but the figure had disappeared before that someone returned.
Ten years later, no one wanted to carve the figure up. Ten years after that, camera crews assembled to record the phenomenon, and they got as much information as the box cameras had a century before. Which was not much at all.
She had watched the footage of all of this, read all of the reports, and had decided that something did appear on the steps. Whether it was some kind of local/natural phenomenon, she didn’t know. She really didn’t have much of a plan herself, except that she would use some high-end analysis equipment that hadn’t even existed twenty years before. (It had been twenty years since someone analyzed the figure, since the last appearance had occurred five days after 9/11. No one really cared about a spooky black figure in that week. The entire world had been fearfully focused on the United States.)
She had a hunch she wouldn’t resolve anything this time either. She would gather enough material for a theory that someone else would have to prove ten years from now. Maybe she’d get a book out of it—one that featured a lot of lovely sketches, paintings, and photographs from the past 190 years. The Organization didn’t care what she did with the information from her reports after she blogged about them and answered questions from commenters on the website.
Then the information belonged to her.
She was going to become known for the wacky and strange instead of the in-depth and insightful. That bothered her sometimes. At other times, she was realistic enough to remind herself that at least she would become known. So many of her colleagues had gone onto writing ad copy or teaching at community colleges.
She started down the Steps. They were slightly worn from nearly three centuries of constant use. She stopped just above the landing. The air felt chillier here. It always did, at least to her, and she knew that had nothing to do with the actual air itself, but her own frame of mind.
Just like the little shiver that ran through her the three times she had actually walked across the steps where the figure would eventually appear had nothing to do with the figure, and everything to do with her own irrational fear of what she might find.
“You know when it will appear.”
He stopped behind her, too close like Italian men always were. She didn’t move away. She didn’t worry about him picking her pocket—she only had a few euros on her. Her credit card and identification were tucked into a money belt hidden beneath the waistband of her pants, practically invisible, or so her hotel mirror told her every morning.
She had to tilt her head to see his face. He stood one step above her. The light from below reflected off his skin. He was older than she had thought, with fine lines beneath his eyes and around his mouth. Laugh lines, her mother would have called them.
But he wasn’t smiling now.
He was looking down on her like an avenging angel, the Church of Trinità dei Monti shadowing him from behind.
“Are you speaking to me?” she asked in her haughtiest Italian.
“You know that I am,” he said. “Just like you know I have been watching you since you first came to the Steps.”
She could have denied it, she supposed, although she saw no point. Just like she saw no point in backing away from him. That would only let him know he had power over her, power to startle her, power to unnerve her, power to make her worry for her own safety.
“You are waiting for it,” he said, “just like I am.”
She realized that anyone else listening to the conversation would hear that last comment as vaguely threatening, maybe even as something with sexual overtones.
But she knew there weren’t any sexual overtones—at least, not intentional ones. She wondered briefly if he was one of those men who knew how handsome he was and used that knowledge subconsciously to control the people around him.
She had a hunch he did.
“Who do you work for?” she asked.
His eyes half closed, shielding their expression from her. She felt a surge of adrenaline. He didn’t want her to know that piece of information.
“Are you one of those—what do you call it in English? Psychic investigators?” He used the English words for that last part, and he didn’t try to hide his contempt.
“I’m not psychic,” she said, “but I am hungry. Join me?”
She went around him, climbing back up the steps to the little restaurant on the Piazza. She didn’t wait to see if he followed; she knew he would eventually.
She flagged down a waiter, let him seat her at a table near the flowers, and watched as the man crossed the Piazza.
He handed the waiter a credit card, then gestured toward the table. The waiter smiled as if they had shared some kind of secret, then he disappeared into the restaurant itself.
The man sat down across from her. “I have ordered wine and bread. The waiter shall bring menus in a moment.”
She knew better than to refuse the wine, even though she really didn’t want any. The figure was scheduled to reappear shortly after six AM, and she wanted to be clearheaded.
She had planned on only making a short visit to the S
teps this night, hoping to return to her hotel room for a few hours of sleep so that she wouldn’t be too drowsy come morning.
The bread arrived quickly, still warm from the oven, smelling divine. The waiter made a fuss of opening the wine, and spent nearly five minutes explaining to her its derivation, not that she cared.
The man studied her. When the waiter left, he leaned back in his chair. “You are not a typical American.”
She shrugged. “I don’t think there are typical Americans.”
“You are not rude,” he said.
“Thank you,” she said. “I think.”
He smiled. His teeth were even and very, very white. He had the look of a retired model, not of a thug. Which made him even more suspect in her opinion.
She sipped her wine. Red, rich, full-bodied, dark with a hint of pepper. She liked it more than she had expected.
“You said you were following me,” she said.
“Do not play coy,” he said. “You know that I was.”
She shrugged again. “I thought you were too shy to say hello.”
He laughed. “I am not shy.”
“Clearly,” she said.
“I was simply trying to be certain if you had a true interest or if you simply enjoyed the Steps themselves.”
She hadn’t thought of enjoyment. She knew that a lot of tourists did enjoy the Steps, spending hours here, chatting, eating, resting. But she had seen the entire area as something to be discovered, not as something to be enjoyed.
She wondered if her surprise at his comment showed on her face.
“True interest in what?” she asked.
“Now you are being coy,” he said.
“I don’t like elliptical conversations,” she said. “Tell me what you’re about.”
The waiter chose that moment to bring the menus. She didn’t even look at hers, ordering a cheese plate. Her companion didn’t order at all, saying the bread would be enough.