The Night Villa (17 page)

I shake the idea off and decide that it’s a lingering effect of the pneumonia, not some kind of mass hysteria, that’s gotten to me. Before I leave the terrace, a sound from below draws me back to the railing. I half expect to see a midnight swimmer, as Phineas had, but instead I see two dark shapes silhouetted against a white outcropping about one third down the steep slope. The sound I’d heard was pebbles falling into the sea—one of the figures is pitching them one by one over the cliff into the water below. When he turns sideways I can see by the round slope of his belly that it’s Simon. The other figure is tall and slim—Elgin, I think at first, but then I hear his voice raised and I realize it’s John Lyros.

“That’s absurd,” Lyros says in an irritated pitch that carries up to the terrace. I hear the low bass rumble of Simon’s reply, but I can’t make out the words. But again I can hear Lyros’s reply.

“You’ve filled your head with these Caprese stories of cults and sacrifices. This isn’t the Villa Lysis and I can’t allow that kind of talk to get around.”

Of course, I think, Lyros was angry at Simon for telling those stories at dinnertime in front of Agnes. I lean over farther to see if I can catch what Simon says next…and remember what Phineas had written about almost losing his balance and falling over the parapet. I have a strong sensation that someone is behind me, someone who would only have to place a hand on my back in order to push me over.

I spin around and for a moment catch the flash of movement in the courtyard. Then I realize it’s only the moonlight reflecting off the bronze statue of Night.

I look back down over the railing. Simon and Lyros have vanished.

Serves me right for eavesdropping, I think, taking a deep breath to calm myself. I should be in bed instead of imagining cultish conspiracies.

As I make my way back to my room, though, I see that I may not have imagined that someone was in the courtyard. In Night’s outstretched right hand, which only a moment ago was empty, there is now a bright red flower. I lean over the water to take it and see that it is, indeed, a live poppy. The flower of Night and the underworld. I suddenly have the same sensation that Phineas describes: the rites have begun.

T
he next morning I carry the poppy—kept fresh overnight in a half-filled bottle of mineral water—downstairs to the lower courtyard and casually lay it down next to my plate at the breakfast table where Simon, George, Agnes and Maria are gathered.

“Ah,” Simon exclaims, looking up from his eggs and sausages, “
Papaver Somniferum.
The flower of sleep and forgetfulness. Where did you find it? I haven’t seen any growing at the villa.”

“I found it in the courtyard last night…after I finished reading the Phineas section.”

“Of course,” George says, “just where Phineas finds it. Someone was playing a little joke on you.”

I look around the table. Agnes is engrossed in reading a letter and Maria is stirring her coffee and staring into space. After a minute, she notices me looking at her. “Perhaps Dr. Lawrence left it for you,” Maria suggests. “He is your admirer, no?”

“No!” I say a bit too vehemently. Agnes glances up from her letter looking puzzled. Maria smiles and taps a manicured fingernail beneath her right eye.

“Ah, I’ve found you out,” she says. “I suspected there was something between you two when he went running off to find you in Naples.”

“Who?” Agnes asks. “Something between who?”

Maria sips her coffee and shrugs.

“That’s ridiculous,” I say. “Elgin and I are colleagues.”
I don’t even like him very much,
I’m tempted to add, but that would only add fuel to Maria’s flame and seem petty after Elgin rescued me from the Hotel Convento. “Besides, I don’t see Elgin going out flower picking late at night. It must have been someone who had read the Phineas earlier than the rest of us though—” I look at George and he shakes his head.

“It wasn’t me! I drank so much wine at dinner I was asleep by ten. Nor would I have any idea where to find a poppy. They certainly don’t grow in the garden here.”

“I bet it was Mr. Lyros.” Agnes puts her letter down and furrows her brow. “He read the section as soon as I finished transcribing it before dinner and he’d know where to find a poppy. And he’s so into re-creating the atmosphere of the original Villa della Notte. He wanted you to feel like the events in Phineas’s book are happening here, now.” Agnes picks up the flower and holds it to her nose, inhaling its spicy scent.

“Careful,” Simon warns. “You know what happened to Dorothy when she ran through the poppy field.”

Agnes looks up at Simon and I fear that she’s going to get upset again as she had last night when Simon recounted the story of Baron Fersen and started talking about American cults. Instead, she smiles sweetly at him. “That’s my favorite part of the
Wizard of Oz,
” she says. “When they all fall asleep until the snow wakes them up. I never thought of it being about drugs, though. I mean, it’s a children’s story.”

“So’s
Alice in Wonderland,
” George points out, “and there’s all that hookah smoking and tablets that say ‘Eat me.’ Drugs have been a source of religious and artistic inspiration for millennia.”

“Like the oracle of Delphi,” Simon adds. “They think the fumes that came up through the cracks under the temple brought on hallucinations. And there are poppies carved into the gates of Eleusis. The initiates no doubt ingested opium to prepare themselves for the rites.”

“I bet opium was part of the rite performed at the Villa della Notte,” George says.

“Of course,” Simon says, “the girl playing the part of the maiden would have been given opium as well. So you see, Miss Hancock, you needn’t have worried so much about Iusta’s role in the ceremonies. She would have been so insensible from the drug that she wouldn’t have felt a thing.”

“You think that makes it all right?” Agnes drops the poppy as though she’d suddenly noticed an insect on it. “That she was drugged? I suppose you think roofies and date rape are okay, too?”

George and I exchange looks, both of us surprised, I think, at Agnes’s irritable tone, but Maria looks up from her breakfast genuinely confused. “Roofies? Date rape? I don’t know these terms. Do rapists make a date with their victims in your country? On a roof?”

Agnes’s eyes widen and I’m afraid she’s going to throw something at Maria or Simon, but instead she bursts into tears and runs from the courtyard. Simon turns to watch her go.

“What?” Maria asks in response to a glare from George. “What did I say wrong? The girl is a bit hysterical, no?”

“Yes,” Simon says, turning back to the table and helping himself to a cornetto. “She seems quite overwrought. She seems to take this whole business personally.”

“You might want to remember that a month ago Agnes’s ex-boyfriend shot and killed two people and then himself right in front of her,” I tell Simon. “You’d take it personally, too.”

“Perhaps the Phineas material isn’t helping,” George says. “She does seem to identify with Iusta, and that’s bound to get more disturbing the way things are going. I think I should give her the morning off and transcribe the next section myself. Maybe you could talk to her, Dr. Chase, take her to the beach or into town for some shopping or something.” George’s long thin fingers flutter in the air as he conjures up these feminine diversions. I can see he’s genuinely concerned about Agnes but that he feels out of his depth.

“I’d be happy to talk to Agnes,” I say, “but I ought to check with Mr. Lyros before I leave the villa—”

“Oh, that’s not necessary,” Maria says. “He and Dr. Lawrence left for Herculaneum early this morning to oversee the excavation of Phineas’s room. I imagine they won’t be back until dinner and I don’t think there’s much work here for you. Perhaps you should look at the shops in town,” she says, eyeing my madras skirt and tank top as though they came from the Salvation Army. (The skirt, in fact, was from a thrift shop on South Congress Avenue.) “Or go to the beach. You could use some color.”

I smile, hoping to hide my chagrin at Maria’s critique of my wardrobe and complexion. “You know,” I say, “I think I’ll do both. Thanks, Maria. Have a good day in the lab.”

It takes me a while to find Agnes’s room in the maze of what would have been the slave quarters in the original Villa della Notte and now houses the staff of the Papyrus Project. It’s a tiny room with whitewashed walls that Agnes has decorated with postcards from tourist sites around the Bay of Naples: the lovely yellow-robed Flora from Stabia, the portrait of a young Pompeian matron holding a stylus to her lips that’s in the Naples Museum, a dancing maenad from Pompeii’s Villa of the Mysteries. Interspersed with these images of graceful Roman women are views of the Swiss Alps. Agnes is lying on her bed, still clutching the letter she’d had at breakfast.
Of course,
I realize,
it’s from Sam.
I’m about to ask her if that’s what had upset her when my attention is drawn to a small plaster statue on her nightstand.

“I’ve seen this before,” I say, picking up the statue of a mother holding a child.

“Isn’t it sweet,” Agnes says, sitting up and smiling at the statue. “It’s called the Madonna della Mare. The Madonna of the Sea. I bought it at a little shop near the ferry in Naples. The old woman who sold it to me said it was a copy of a statue in a church in Naples and that people prayed to it when they or their loved ones were taking a sea journey. Look, she’s wearing a crown shaped like waves. I don’t usually like Catholic things, but she doesn’t look like any other Catholic saint I’ve ever seen. She has the sweetest smile.”

I look into the face of the little figure and see what Agnes means. The face is simply carved, almost primitive, and her smile is enigmatic, as if she held the secret to all of life’s mysteries. “I think I saw the original in a little church near my hotel in Naples,” I say, looking down at Agnes. Although she’s trying to smile, I can see from her red eyes that she’s been crying hard. “Speaking of the sea,” I say, putting the statue carefully down on the nightstand, “get your bathing suit. I’m dying to get in the water.”

After I’ve changed into my bathing suit, terry-cloth cover-up, and sandals I meet Agnes back in the lower courtyard. The stairs to the beach start on the north end of the courtyard and descend several stories belowground. It feels like we’re going into a catacomb.

“Mr. Lyros says that the stairs are part of the original plan of the Herculanean villa, only it’s not clear where they went. When I read the section of Phineas yesterday I thought that maybe they led to an underground grotto, or nymphaeum, with access to the sea. That would explain how Iusta appeared in the water beneath the peristylium. I bet that’s where the rites took place.”

“An underground sanctuary to represent Hades,” I say, “perfect for reenacting the abduction of Persephone into the underworld.” Concentrating on the scholarly puzzle keeps my growing anxiety at bay as we descend deeper underground. I’d never been troubled by claustrophobia before, but since the shooting and losing part of my lung, I’m finding it hard to breathe in enclosed places. The stairwell is amply lit by shell-shaped sconces set into niches, the walls are newly plastered and dry, the steps carved from cool, white marble, but still, I feel uneasy. I focus on the top of Agnes’s head below me—on her blond ponytail that bobs up and down as she trips lightly down the stairs. With the yellow bow of her halter bathing suit top at the nape of her neck, her orange UT T-shirt, and rubber flip-flops she certainly doesn’t look anything like a girl descending into Hell.

“And if the underground grotto had access to the sea,” I continue in my professorial mode, “then the women playing the sirens could have come and gone through the water. I bet that would have made for a dramatic effect.”

“Kind of like the old mermaid show at Aquarena Springs in San Marcos,” Agnes says, glancing back over her shoulder at me. “Did you ever go to it before they turned the theme park into a nature center?”

“Yes,” I say. An image of my mother, her eyes sparking green in the murky underwater light, appears in my head. “But I’m surprised you’re old enough to remember it. It closed down in the early nineties.”

“Oh, I’ve heard people talk about it. You know how Austinites are always going on about the good old days.”

“Yeah,” I say, “it can get kind of annoying, like you’ve missed out on something.” Something about Agnes’s answer strikes me as evasive and I wonder if it was Elgin who told her about the Mermaid show, and whether he told her the story I told him about my mother and the mermaids on the boat ride to Capri. The idea of him sharing that intimate bit of my history with Agnes makes me flush with shame. I’m glad that Agnes isn’t looking at me—and that she drops the subject when we reach the bottom of the steps.

“In the original villa, these steps would have ended here,” she says, opening the door, “wherever it was they led, but we’re quite a bit farther above the sea here so…”

Beyond the door is wide open blue sky and a limestone ledge a hundred feet above the sea. The steps continue down in the open, hugging the limestone cliff. There’s a low wall, about four feet high, on the sea side, but beyond that it’s a sheer drop to the rocks below.

“Keep close to the cliff wall,” Agnes instructs as she starts down. “The stairs are steep and the rock is uneven in places. Mr. Lyros says the stairs were here when he built the property and were probably built by fishermen who used this cove.”

Or by mountain goats,
I think, clinging to the limestone wall. It’s hard to imagine any other creature scaling this vertical rise. But when I feel something skitter over my hand I discover the other inhabitant of the island capable of navigating this terrain: the blue lizard.

“Aren’t they darling?” Agnes asks when she sees me staring at the creature. “I wish I could take one home with me. C’mon, we’d better get going or we won’t have much time before the tide comes in.”

Agnes starts back down the stairs as the blue lizard disappears behind a veil of yellow broom and sea fennel. Something else is in the little niche. I push the greenery aside, releasing the sharp scent of licorice, and see that it’s a satyr with an enormous phallus and that the phallus itself has two eyes and a leering grin. I’m so startled by the unexpected lewdness that I step back, trip over a loose stone and land on the edge of the sea wall. For a moment the sea and sky spin around me, the steep cliffs looming over me like leering giants ready to brush me loose like a fleck of dust from their shoulders. I squeeze my eyes shut and clutch my nails into the crumbing limestone until the vertigo passes.

When I open my eyes, the world has righted itself and the obscene little statue is once again hidden in its green shrine. I release my hold on the wall and find I’m gripping loose pebbles. A pile of them are neatly stacked on the wall. This must be where Simon and John Lyros were standing last night when I saw them from the terrace. Lyros had said something about Simon imagining cult practices all around them. I’d thought he was just reprimanding Simon for teasing Agnes at dinner, but now I wonder if instead they had been arguing about this statue. Had Simon found the statue in the niche and suggested that Lyros was practicing some kind of modern cult ritual? The idea that Lyros might be re-creating some kind of ritual here in his re-creation of the Villa della Notte is alarming. It’s the last place Agnes should be after what she’s been through.