Page 25 of The Villa

“What?” she asks. The typing stops.

“Real.”

Now it’s her turn to stare at me. We hold each other’s gaze for about three heartbeats, and then she just shakes her head a little. “Okay,” is all she says, and I sigh, putting both palms on the table and pushing myself up from my chair.

“I think I need a break,” I say, and Chess may be irritated with me, but at least she doesn’t use the opening I just gave her to point out that I haven’t actually done enough work to require a break.

“Giulia is bringing lunch in about an hour,” is all she says in response, and I nod, leaving her to her furious typing.

Problem is, once I’m out of the dining room, I’m once again unsure what to do with myself. I could take the car into Orvieto—we still haven’t done that, happy to hide ourselvesaway in the villa—but that would require going back into the dining room and asking Chess where the keys are, and we clearly need a little space from each other right now. I’m already a little waterlogged from consecutive afternoons spent by the pool, and obviously writing is not on the agenda.

Instead, I find myself drifting back upstairs to the little library and picking upLilith Risingfrom where I left it on top of the shelf.

The cover looks even more lurid today, and I snort softly. Thirty-five years old, almost thirty-six, and I’m about to hole up with a scary book because my friend hurt my feelings.

I find a good spot for that kind of Peak Seventh Grade Wallowing, a window seat tucked into the upstairs hallway, and I fold myself up, an undeniable thrill running through my fingertips as I turn to the first page.

Houses remember.

“Good opening line,” I murmur. “Well done, Mari.” Opening lines are important, after all, which makes them the hardest part of the book sometimes. And Mari came up with that one when she was just nineteen.

I keep reading.

Lilith Risingis a good, old-fashioned haunted house book, so it builds up that dread about the setting right away, and I’m deep into Chapter Two before it clicks.

Somerton House sat on a small rise overlooking a quaint and peaceful village, and Victoria liked to spend afternoons on the window seat at the top of the stairs, watching the lawn slope into trees, watching the trees give way to rooftops.

She was there on the summer afternoon it all began, sitting on that same seat with its faded green cushion, a small tear in the left corner, stuffing spilling out in a way that made her think uncomfortably of wounds. It was raining, as it hadbeen nearly every day that week, and Victoria watched the water slick down the glass as (with a diamond ring pilfered from her mother’s jewelry box just that morning) she stealthily scratched a “V” in the right corner of the furthermost pane.

I put the book down, a chill rippling through me. The cushion I’m sitting on isn’t green, and it definitely isn’t torn—for the kind of prices people paid to stay here, I doubt anything that isn’t pristinely Shabby Chic is allowed. But the view from the window does look over the lawn, and the lawn does eventually become trees, and past those, I can make out the tops of a few buildings.

This is Italy, though, not the English countryside, and the description isn’t super specific. Still, looking at the view from this window and reading the view described in the book, I keep imagining Mari Godwick sitting in this same spot almost fifty years ago, a notebook on her raised knees, scribbling down the story that will one day become one of the most famous horror novels in the world.

I lift the book again, ready to read on, and as I do, my eyes drift to the windowpane.

And there it is.

I putLilith Risingback on the cushion, leaning forward.

At first, it just looks like a flaw, a smudge even, but I reach out and touch the corner of the pane with my finger, tracing the shape etched there.

Not aV.

AnM.

MARI, 1974—ORVIETO

“Do you like it?”

Mari sits at the end of the bed, her cotton floral nightgown sliding off one shoulder as the last note Pierce played seems to hover in the air between them.

He’s reclining against the headboard, guitar cradled in his lap, his hair a wreck, and Mari thinks she’s never been more in love with him. Not even that first night he kissed her in the back garden of her father’s house.

By then, he’d admitted that he was married, and she had known that this was wrong and probably headed for disaster. But she hadn’t cared.

And in moments like this, when it’s just the two of them in their perfect cocoon, she doesn’t regret any of it.

“It’s gorgeous,” she tells him now, crawling forward on her knees and placing her hands on either side of his face. “Absolutely gorgeous.”

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