Page 77 of In the Garden of Monsters

Paolo and I crept after Lillian, who was moving slowly through the brush to the little bridge that led into the top floor of the leaning house. After a pause to listen for movement, she turned onto the bridge and shone her flashlight into the house. Glancing back at us, she shook her head. Nothing there. She pointed in and to the left, to the second room of the house, then began to move toward the door, but Paolo stopped her, stretching his arm out in front of her to indicate he would check out the house, not her.

I held my breath. Paolo’s dark figure moved inside, his flashlight barely lighting the way, then cautiously peered around the corner into the adjacent room. He disappeared for a second, before returning to us, shaking his head.

He held a pomegranate in his hand.

“It was on the floor in the center of the room,” he explained.

Lillian took it from him, weighing it in one hand. “I’m tired of these games. Isn’t the statue of Ceres near us somewhere?”

Julia...go back...The whisper of the ghost was loud in my ear.Hurry. Go back...

I thought my knees might give beneath me. “We should go, Lillian. This is madness. We shouldn’t be here.”

But she had already turned around, her light moving toward the darkness, where I knew the goddess rested in the bushes. Paolo motioned with his hand to come along, then trotted after her.

I almost left them and turned down the path back toward Orlando and the woodsman and the secret passage beyond. But they had the flashlights, and there was no way I could traverse the quarter-mile tunnel in total blackness. I swallowed hard and followed. When I reached them, Lillian and Paolo were shining their flashlights on Ceres’s face, illuminating her serene features and the bowl on her head. I gasped. The flowers that had been so bright and alive earlier that day were dead, the stalks brown and shriveled, falling over the edges of the bowl.

“Some goddess of nature she is,” Lillian joked, her voice loud in the silence of theboschetto.“Can’t even manage to keep her flowers alive.”

As soon as they were uttered, I wished I could shove those words back into my friend’s mouth.Don’t make her mad, I wanted to scream at her.

Yet Lillian thrived on impulse. She lifted her arm and threw the pomegranate as hard as possible at the goddess. The fruit burst across her chest, the bloodred juice spraying across her bared breasts.

“I suoi occhi.”Paolo pointed at the goddess’s eyes, which had slowly begun to light up green.

It was as though I was rooted to the spot, unable to move. I watched her eyes brighten, and then there was movement on her shoulder, the stone cherub that rested there coming to life, extending its hand, one finger outstretched, pointing at us.

A massive rumble began beneath our feet.

A few paces away, I heard Orpheus’s little voice rise in a yowl.

I finally found my voice.“Run!”

My friends did not hesitate. We bolted from the goddess. Orpheus ran ahead of us, his white fur glowing in the moonlight, a beacon in the darkness. We followed the cat past Hannibal’s elephant, past the maw of theorco, and the vase where one of the Julias was buried, then up the stairs toward Proserpina’s bench. The rumble grew louder, the trees swayed dangerously, and the ground shook beneath us as we ran.

We passed the little statue of Cerberus and raced up the stairs toward thetempietto. When we reached the top, there was a roar behind us. Orpheus yowled in response, a terrible, unnatural sound I had never heard from a cat. I ventured a look back, and in the darkness at the bottom of the stairs, a three-headed dog at least twice the size of a horse reared back. Cerberus made a noise that was deeper than a bark and louder than the roar of a lion. It was facing away from us, toward the inner part of the garden. After a wild howl, the beast suddenly went silent, and that was even more terrifying.

The ground shook, nearly drowning out my scream with its rumbling. We were nowhere near the secret passage, but the road back to thecastellowas right before us, beyond the arch in the wall and its broken gate across the field. None of us needed words to convey to each other that we should head toward it.

Lillian tripped just before we reached the gate. Her flashlight flew out of her hand and went dark somewhere in the field. Paolo and I stopped to help her up, but as she rose from the ground, she yelled at us to keep running. Behind us, across the field at the top of the stairs near thetempietto, a massive figure loomed, its green eyes bright. It was the giant statue of Orlando Furioso. Something was slung over its shoulder. My blood went cold.

“Go,” I screamed.

Orpheus jumped through the gate. Paolo and I followed, Lillian on our heels. We had to climb over a few crumbled stones from the arch over our heads. But then we were past it and on the road leading to the village and Palazzo Orsini.

We were out of the garden but not out of danger. The ground continued to shake.

Then, to my horror, it began to snow.

It had been a warm day and evening, and there hadn’t been a cloud in the sky. Besides, it rarely snowed in the Lazio region of Central Italy. And yet the wind whipped up around us and the flakes began to fall, fat and wet, sticking in clumps on my coat and catching in my eyelashes. Soon it was falling hard enough that we could barely see in front of us. I was terrified we might slip in the accumulating snow, but none of us dared slow down.

The only indication we were heading in the right direction was the low rock wall that edged the road to the village. Somewhere along the way, Orpheus disappeared in the blinding whiteness. I hoped he would find his way to someplace warm and safe.

My legs burned and I was sure my companions also felt the strain of our pace, but we continued on. Paolo raced along beside me, and from time to time, I caught flashes of Lillian’s red cape out of the corner of my eye. The ground still shook, but the strength of the tremors had diminished, and the rumbling was no longer constant. Instead, behind us, there was a cadence, a thud, thud, thud, like footsteps of stone.

It seemed like forever before we neared the open arch of the Bomarzo gate. When I saw it looming above us and the little lights of the village beyond, I began to cry, tears freezing on my face as we found new energy to reach the palazzo at the top of the slope.

An explosion of snow and rocks erupted in a loud boom before us, stopping us in our tracks, the flying debris forcing us to double over to protect ourselves. Lillian huddled against me. When the powder had cleared, we cried aloud at the sight of the stone creature before us—it was the figure the giant statue in theboschettohad been tearing apart.

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