The House of Last Resort E-Book

Christopher Golden

• Herausgeber: Titan Books
• Kategorie: Abenteuer, Thriller, Horror
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2024

Seitenzahl: 437

Beschreibung

A horror-filled tale of crumbling catacombs and the darkest family secrets, set in the picturesque hills of Sicily, from the acclaimed author of Road of Bones and All Hallows. Across Italy there are many half-empty towns, nearly abandoned by those who migrate to the coast or to cities. The beautiful, crumbling hilltop town of Becchina is among them, but its mayor has taken drastic measures to rebuild―selling abandoned homes to anyone in the world for a single Euro, as long as the buyer promises to live there for at least five years. It's a no-brainer for American couple Tommy and Kate Puglisi. Both work remotely, and Becchina is the home of Tommy's grandparents, his closest living relatives. It feels like a romantic adventure, an opportunity the young couple would be crazy not to seize. But from the moment they move in, they both feel a shadow has fallen on them. Tommy's grandmother is furious, even a little frightened, when she realizes which house they've bought. There are rooms in an annex at the back of the house that they didn't know were there. The place makes strange noises at night, locked doors are suddenly open, and when they go to a family gathering, they're certain people are whispering about them, and about their house, which one neighbor refers to as The House of Last Resort. Soon, they learn that the home was owned for generations by the Church, but the real secret, and the true dread, is unlocked when they finally learn what the priests were doing in this house for all those long years…and how many people died in the strange chapel inside. While down in the catacombs beneath Becchina…something stirs.

Leseprobe

CONTENTS

Cover

Title Page

Leave us a Review

Copyright

Dedication

Book One September Above

1

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

9

10

11

12

13

14

15

16

Book Two October Below

1

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

9

10

11

12

13

14

15

16

17

18

19

20

21

Acknowledgments

About the Author

Praise for The House of Last Resort

“This novel shines. Golden’s frenzied tale of demons and exorcisms is fast-paced, his portrayal of the insidiousness of possession is unsettling and it all comes together in a thrilling closing act.”

New York Times

“Christopher Golden’s The House of Last Resort runs deep, shining a light on the closely held self-deceptions that drive us, and then going farther still, into the catacombs beneath La Chiesa San Domenico, where something inhuman stirs among the dead. An expert work of suspense from an author who keeps getting better and better.”

Owen King, New York Times-bestselling author of The Curator

“Dark, eerie and full of dread, each page exudes menace—I couldn’t put it down. Part of me remains in The House of Last Resort long after I closed the book.”

Catriona Ward, author of Looking Glass Sound

“Terror begins at home in this creepy, slow burn novel that cautions perhaps some secrets should stay buried, where they belong.”

Christina Henry, author of Near The Bone and Alice

“The king of horror thrillers does it again. With this thoroughly modern exorcism story, Golden will make you believe in the existence of true evil.”

Alma Katsu, author of The Fervor

“An absolute ripper of a fire-and-brimstone, capital-H Horror novel. I tore through it so fast my fingertips bled. Which probably summoned the book’s demons.”

Daniel Kraus, author of Whalefall

Also by Christopher Golden and available from Titan Books

Road of Bones

All Hallows

Alien: River of Pain

Aliens: Bug Hunt

Marvel Classic Novels—X-Men: Mutant Empire

Predator: The Official Movie Novelization

Sons of Anarchy: Bratva

Uncharted: The Fourth Labyrinth

Anthologies including Christopher Golden available from Titan Books

Christmas and Other Horrors

Cursed: An Anthology

Dark Cities

Hex Life: Wicked New Tales of Witchery

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The House of Last Resort

Print edition ISBN: 9781803369495

E-book edition ISBN: 9781803369501

Published by Titan Books

A division of Titan Publishing Group Ltd

144 Southwark Street, London SE1 0UP

www.titanbooks.com

First edition: September 2024

1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead (except for satirical purposes), is entirely coincidental. The publisher does not have control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.

Christopher Golden asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

Copyright © 2024 Christopher Golden. All rights reserved.

No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library.

For Nicholas and Danielle

Only you and your darkness know who you are.

Amber Tamblyn

BOOK ONE

SEPTEMBER ABOVE

1

The rats are like fingers.

No. That’s not right. Fingers can reach out, can grasp and extend. The rats are not like fingers at all. They are periscopes, like those on submarines, each able to give its captain only a limited view of the world above. From their place below, among the dead, the lost ones can see only as far as the rats can see. But they are patient, and so they wait. And they let the rats run.

2

Tommy fought the urge to jump from the car and run all the way home. Kate would murder him, of course, and his grandparents—who awaited their arrival—would be less than pleased. The fact that he’d sold his childhood home and given up the apartment he and Kate had shared in Boston would also be a problem. They’d put the Mediterranean Sea and thousands of miles of Atlantic Ocean between themselves and everything they knew to start this new adventure together in Sicily.

This was home now.

The tiny Fiat wound its way up through the narrow streets of Becchina. The engine whined in protest at having to pull the small trailer up the twisty road that was the heart of this hill town.

“Hey,” Kate said, reaching over to put a hand on his thigh. “It’s going to be perfect.”

“Your Tommy-sense kicking in again?”

“I don’t need superpowers. You think I can’t just look at you and see how tense you are?” Kate took his right hand off the wheel and kissed his knuckles. “I told you. It’s going to be perfect. Trust me.”

She squeezed his hand to ground him, let him know she was with him all the way.

Tommy pulled back his hand. “I need both to steer. Last thing I want to do is crash into one of these old buildings. Not the first impression I want to make on the locals.”

Kate scoffed. “It wouldn’t exactly be your first impression. You’re like royalty around here.”

“That’s a slight exaggeration.”

“Is it, though?”

She was overstating a bit, but it was true he wasn’t exactly a stranger to Becchina. The population had dwindled over the past few decades, but many of the people had met him before. He had been here five times in his twenty-eight years, visiting his grandparents first with his mom and dad, and later just with his mother. Then, four months ago, he had come to Becchina with Kate, and that had changed everything.

In many ways, it had become a ghost town. There were many of them in Sicily—places too distant from the island’s coast or from the few business hubs, places abandoned by the young in favor of Palermo, or more likely Rome or Milan on the mainland. The more adventurous departed for other European nations or for the United States. Some of the hill towns in the vast island’s interior managed to use tourism to keep their communities alive, if not exactly vibrant, but Becchina didn’t have the castles of Erice, or the cathedral of Monreale. It didn’t have fifth-century temples with a view of the Mediterranean like Agrigento.

Becchina did have a few things going for it. An ancient set of stone steps wove down through the town—two hundred twenty-seven steps, more than the famous stairs in Ragusa. The town also boasted a church with a blue neoclassical dome older than the one on the basilica in Ragusa, but church and dome were both in desperate need of restoration. The town had breathtaking views of the valley and quiet streets that were clean and colorful. Yet somehow it had never made it onto the radar of the travel sites.

A forty-minute drive from the volcanic Mount Etna, Becchina should have been alive.

Instead, it was the corpse of a town that didn’t even realize it was already dead.

The mayor, Fausto Brancati, had seen other towns take drastic measures and had followed their lead. Becchina needed new blood, and it no longer mattered where that blood originated. At Mayor Brancati’s instruction, the town seized abandoned homes and offered them for sale for a single euro, with certain strings attached. The buyer had to live in the home for at least five years and had to spend a minimum of fifty thousand euros on renovations. They were trying to lure people with a sense of adventure and romance, people who might stay beyond the five years, who might have children in Becchina and raise them here, although in his heart, Brancati had to know that most of those children would leave when they were old enough.

That’s a long way off, Tommy thought. He wasn’t even sure he and Kate would stay the five years needed to solidify their ownership of their new house. But he wasn’t going to tell her that.

“I still have no idea how the movers’ truck is going to get to the house,” Kate said as the Fiat juddered through a series of potholes.

“Magic?” Tommy said. “Maybe they use a hot air balloon.”

She poked him in the side.

“Hey! Don’t poke the driver!”

“Hot air balloon, my butt.”

Tommy snickered. “So many jokes. Brain overloading.”

“I would punch you so hard, but I’m glad to see you smiling. This is supposed to be a happy day. Literally the happiest day that isn’t our wedding day. It’s like a dream. Look around you, Tom.”

“I’m trying not to crash.”

“I may punch you again if you don’t look around.”

He looked around.

Kate was not always right, but Tommy would admit she often showed a lot more common sense than he did. Only a year his senior, somehow she’d acquired far more wisdom than he’d managed.

Spring flowers bloomed in window boxes along the road into town. Most of the buildings were bleached by the sun, the color of sand, some so pale they looked like the ghosts of houses that must once have been full of life and laughter. A pair of elderly women walked up the steep road, arms linked, each cradling a bag of groceries with her free hand. A work crew crawled like ants over a row house with a wine shop on the first floor, new owners in the midst of having the place renovated. It made Tommy feel better to see them, a reminder that they weren’t alone in starting fresh in Becchina.

The Fiat bumped through a pothole. Kate let out a little yelp as Tommy twisted to look behind them, worried as he had been every mile about the little trailer they pulled. They had bought the used Fiat partly for its price tag, but mostly for its size. The streets were narrow here, and they wanted to be able to maneuver. They had rented this trailer for the same reason. The moving truck would bring most of the things they had shipped across the ocean—a few items of furniture that meant something to him, or to Kate, and some books and artwork they could not easily replace in Sicily. The trailer behind the Fiat carried their suitcases, their laptops, and a few items of furniture they had just bought in Catania. Also in the trailer, taking up very little room, were two plastic crates of family photos and other things Tommy had rescued from the house after his mother died. They were all that was left of her now.

Everything else would be sourced locally, from merchants or artisans, or—morelikely—passed down by his grandparents or their many friends and neighbors in town. Tommaso Puglisi was a ninety-six-year-old stonemason who still told stories of outrunning bombs during World War II. His wife, Raffaella—Raffi to her friends—was thirteen years younger, still spry, and knew everyone in Becchina, not to mention many of their secrets. Sicilians were notorious gossips, and his nonna was no exception. He remembered his nonno as a man who frowned in disapproval at the gossip even as he joined in, but when Tommy and Kate had visited four months earlier, Nonno had seemed less engaged, his focus drifting. He hadn’t forgotten anyone’s name yet, but his short-term memory had begun to deteriorate.

Age-related dementia, his googling had suggested. Entirely normal for someone who had managed to live so long. But still hard to watch.

Now, according to Nonna, the old man barely got up from his chair except to use the bathroom. His knees hurt him terribly, and he had decided it wasn’t worth it to go out and socialize with their friends. Tommy knew it had to feel like a prison sentence to his grandmother, who had always been such a social woman. What had given Tommy the clearest picture of his grandfather’s condition was when Nonna told him that he didn’t watch much television anymore. Tommy thought that meant he had lost interest, but Nonna said it was because he had trouble understanding the stories unfolding on the screen. His mind had become so cloudy that he could not follow the plot.

Tommy was glad to be in Becchina for many reasons, but chief among them was the opportunity to spend time with his grandparents. As far as he knew, they had never visited the United States. His entire experience of them had been during the times he had spent in Sicily. When he and his parents had come here as a family, his father had been withdrawn to the point of coldness, which had always made him sad, especially because his grandparents had been so welcoming, so full of love and good humor. Nonno’s eyes had twinkled with mischief, and Nonna had always behaved as if feeding her grandson was the greatest happiness she had ever known. The one time Tommy had asked his father why he was so unhappy in Sicily, all he would say was that he had left for a reason and that someday Tommy would understand.

His father had died young, dropped by a heart attack before Tommy was old enough to really connect with him as a person. After his father’s death, Tommy had grown up in the shadow of a mother who gave as much love as her narcissism would allow, but whose delusional self-interest hurt everyone eventually. She had insisted that his father’s heart attack had been triggered by stress from his relationship with his parents. Tommy secretly thought that if stress had killed his father, it had come from closer to home, but he never said that to his mother.

As rarely as he had seen them, his grandparents had been the best example of kindness and generosity in his life, until he met Kate.

Kate was his world.

“We’re good,” he said, as much to himself as to his wife. He meant the Fiat and the trailer, but he could have been referring to so many things.

She bent forward and looked out the windshield, craning her neck to look up at the tops of buildings, the street signs, and the sky.

“Next left, I think,” she said.

Tommy nodded. “Then two rights.”

“I see the church dome.” Kate pointed, though Tommy didn’t dare to look. The buildings were so close on either side that if they’d been in a car any wider than the Fiat, he would have tucked in the mirrors to avoid the risk of shattering them.

When they turned left, they were on centuries-old cobblestones. The Fiat and the trailer rattled, and Tommy’s knuckles tightened on the steering wheel. He would get used to it, he knew, but it made his teeth hurt.

They passed a market and a butcher’s, a gelato stand, and a little hardware store. But his eyes were drawn to empty storefronts that had once been a dress shop, a bookstore café, and a restaurant, as well as others whose previous lives were more difficult to discern. Tommy knew what Kate would say—she would tell him those empty spaces were opportunities, and he would convince himself she was right, because he so wanted her to be. Needed her to be.

They had tried to convince many of their friends to take this leap with them, to leave behind all the absurd demands and debilitating stresses of late-stage capitalism and to start over in a place where they could afford to try to build a dream. Some were intrigued, but nobody had been willing to make the jump just yet. Kate was convinced that if they could make a life here, some of those friends would follow. People who didn’t need to work in an office or who had entrepreneurial or artistic dreams. Tommy wanted that to be true.

He turned right. Saw the faded and patched dome of the church, and then he turned right again at the next block. The homes, row houses, were all connected here, the walls of one kissing the walls of the next. Their new place was an exception. It stood at the top of a dead-end street with an eighty-foot drop-off at the edge of the property and a breathtaking view of the valley. A waist-high split rail fence was all that separated their property from the edge of the cliff. That, and an old bench with peeling green paint. On a clear day, when Mount Etna was angry, they would be able to see the smoke of the volcano from their front stoop.

The address was 17 Via Dionisio, and the house—God, the house was even more beautiful than Tommy remembered. Bougainvillea climbed the walls, its purple flowers vivid in the sunshine, vines filling cracks and winding around the gutters. Along the side of the house that faced the cliff were lantana shrubs with their flowers growing wild, as well as bushes of prickly pear and white caper blossoms waving in the wind that blew up over the edge.

Tommy pulled the Fiat to the curb in front of the house and killed the engine.

Kate practically leaped from the car, but she paused and leaned on the roof, smiling up at their new home.

“Look at it.”

Tommy climbed out of the driver’s seat and glanced up. “I’m looking.”

Beautiful as it was, the old stone building needed a lot of love. The entrance had heavy wooden double doors, ten feet high, so weathered and dried that it reminded him of driftwood, its paint worn away in broad swaths. The arched transom window above the door had leaded glass panes that were barely transparent. Time had taken a toll on the ornately carved stone of the lintel. In the United States, only the oldest and most elegant buildings might have such details, but in Italy they were almost ordinary.

What Tommy liked best about the house’s façade was the trio of balconies jutting from the second floor, one above the front doors, the others to either side. The balconies were just as ornate as the lintel. The wrought iron railings were rusted, and some of the glass panes in the balconies’ french doors had been smashed and then boarded up instead of being replaced, but any house would begin to decay once it stood devoid of life. Without people to live there, to give it voice and a heartbeat, the house had fallen into disrepair.

Tommy and Kate would breathe new life into it.

“It’s like fate,” he said. “I can’t believe we almost bought the other one.”

Kate shut her car door and came around to join him, taking a moment to admire the house and languish in the moment of their new beginning. “The house on Via Dogali would have been fine, but this one feels like a real adventure.”

They had been in the midst of arranging to buy the other place—a crumbling stone row house, sun-bleached, just another blank and ordinary residence in this forgotten town—when their real estate broker had mentioned this one. It hadn’t even been listed among the homes available for the one-euro-incentive deal, but Franca had assured them that 17 Via Dionisio could be theirs for the same price, under the same terms. By the time they had completed their walk-through, both of them knew their plans had changed.

Four months later, here they were.

At their front door.

Tommy turned to Kate. He brushed a wild lock of golden curls away from her face and tucked it behind her ear. “How did I get so lucky?”

She answered that question the way she always did. “You caught me in a moment of weakness.”

He kissed her softly, then brushed his lips against her forehead. They rested in each other’s arms for a few moments.

“We’re really doing this,” Kate said.

“You’re just figuring that out?”

“It’s different when it’s real.”

Tommy studied the dreamy look on his wife’s face. “Are you thinking we made a mistake?”

“Not at all.” Her eyes were alight with mischief. “I feel like we’re free. Like we found this secret that nobody else knows.”

“Like we’re getting away with something.”

“Exactly. And don’t forget, your family might have roots here, but I’m the one who pushed for this. I can’t wait to get started.”

He kissed her again, for much longer this time. The breeze gusted over the edge of the cliff, the air scented with the wildflowers of their new home.

In the midst of that kiss, the ground began to shake.

Tommy didn’t notice at first. In the back of his mind, he connected the rumbling in the road beneath his feet to the passage of a massive truck, but there were no trucks on Via Dionisio just then. A pair of goldfinches took flight from the main balcony overhead. The bougainvillea on the front of the house waved and swayed.

“My God,” Kate managed. And then the whole world shook.

In his head, Tommy held the word earthquake, but he wasn’t sure it found its way to his lips. The tremor felt deep, and it traveled from down in the earth up into his bones. Somewhere nearby, dogs began barking in unison, as if a maestro had tapped his baton and the chorus had kicked off as one. Car alarms blared from the next street. Tommy and Kate clutched each other’s hands, frozen. Neither of them had ever experienced an earthquake before and didn’t know how to rank this one. A tremor, a full-on quake? Enough to bring Becchina down around them? Tommy remembered a news report from when he was a kid, a crumbling old hill town somewhere in Italy, sun-bleached and ancient, turned entirely to rubble by an earthquake. Part of him wanted to stay frozen, to just hold Kate, and hope.

But the house remained standing. It shook, but it stood, and he knew doorways were supposed to be safe. True or not, that was just about all he’d ever learned about quakes. For tornadoes, it was cellars or bathtubs; for floods, you kept an axe in the attic in case you had to hack your way onto the roof; and for earthquakes—

“The house!” he barked, only realizing as he grabbed Kate’s hand and yanked her toward their front doors that he was shouting to be heard over the grinding roar of the earth.

Kate had the keys in the little cross-body bag strapped across her chest. She staggered and nearly went sprawling, but she managed to dig the key out. Tommy could only watch as she propped one hand against the door and scraped the key around the lock. He felt drunk, or as if she were, the way her hand wavered, but it was the ground moving, the world trying to shake off its humans like a dog shaking off fleas. He held his breath. The end, he thought. Just those two words. This was supposed to be the beginning, but the end kept echoing in his head.

The door popped open. He wasn’t even sure she’d turned the key. It swung inward without a push, and Kate spilled into the dusty foyer. Just before he crossed the threshold, Tommy saw the front of his new house shrug upward. Two panes in the fanlight window over the doors cracked, and a single shard of glass came loose and fell onto the floor inside. He grabbed Kate and pulled her back so that the two of them were together beneath that ornate lintel. Is this smart? Is this right? Standing under hundreds of pounds of marble or granite didn’t seem very clever to him.

Kate hugged him tightly. Tommy held on to her, his life preserver.

“Shit, shit, shit, shit,” she chanted, squeezing him, one word over and over, but that was one word more than he could muster.

Still afraid that standing on the threshold must be a mistake, an even bigger risk, Tommy glanced into the house, scanning the arched entrances to the rooms on the left and right, the staircase, and the hall that went back to the kitchen. Dust filled the air. Plaster sifted from the ceiling and floated down like ash from an eruption. Something moved at the top of the stairs. He caught just a glimpse of it through the cloud of ash and plaster, as if through a fog. The figure flitted through the dark obscurity up there and was gone. Someone was inside their house.

“Tommy, what did we do?” Kate asked, voice muffled because her face was buried in his chest.

He looked down at her, held on.

And it was over.

3

The first thing Kate did when the world stopped shaking was step outside and make sure the rest of the town was still there. A laugh bubbled in her chest, but somehow her lips would not release it. Heart still thumping, she looked down the road, startled to see no chasms in the pavement. None of the old, bleached buildings had crumbled. The flowers were still vivid with color, and the street still looked lonely and a little sad, despite the blue sky and the birds that wheeled overhead. It was as if nothing had happened, but she couldn’t convince her body of that. Her pulse raced, anxiety rattling in her skull.

Three doors down from their dead-end manse, on the other side of the road, an old woman poked her head out. She wore a floral cotton housecoat and had curlers in her dark, dyed hair, as if Sicily had never emerged from the 1950s. Curious, she looked to the left and then the right. When she spotted Kate, they locked eyes for a moment. Birdlike, the old woman cocked her head and studied the new arrival, but instead of waving or even offering a nod of acknowledgment, she withdrew into her home and shut the door loudly enough for the sound to echo along the street.

Aside from Signora Housecoat, none of the neighbors made an appearance.

“You okay?” Tommy asked. He stepped up behind her and put a hand on her shoulder.

Kate managed a dry laugh. “Hell no.”

“We said we were going to share a lot of firsts when we moved to Sicily.”

She turned and punched his arm. “First earthquake was not what I had in mind.”

His smile remained, but she saw the gray pallor of his skin and knew it was forced. They were both still in shock. Whatever Kate had expected for a welcome, it wasn’t this.

“It’s so bizarre,” she said. “From the way it felt, I expected worse. But I don’t see any damage. And only one old lady came outside to investigate, like it’s just an ordinary Tuesday for them. How often do they have earthquakes here, Tommy? Please tell me this isn’t something you knew about and didn’t bother to mention, because I might be willing to go to prison in Sicily if it means I get to murder you for keeping that from me.”

“Wait . . . you’d murder me?”

She smirked. “In Sicily, I said. I figure the prison food must be a hell of a lot better here than in Massachusetts.”

Tommy pondered that. “Okay. Fair enough. But you won’t need to murder me yet. I mean, give it time—I’m sure I’ll do something stupid enough to make you homicidal. Husbands usually do, if pop culture has taught me anything. But no. If earthquakes are a common occurrence, that is not a thing I knew.”

Kate reminded him that she had lived her entire life in Massachusetts without experiencing a single noticeable quake, but even as she spoke, she found herself calming down. Being with Tommy always put her at ease.

Their first date had been nothing special—midafternoon coffee at a little café in Portsmouth, followed by a bit of window-shopping, then down to the harbor to watch the boats head out to sea. She had laughed so much with him, had felt so peaceful, not in spite of the way he liked to verbally spar with her but because of it. So many guys used humor as a way to create distance, to hide emotion or depth, or lack thereof. But Tommy’s humor flowed from a real place within him, which meant that when a moment turned serious or somber, he remained open and honest. He didn’t realize how rare that was, and she cherished him for it. The peace he always gave her—that was the reason she had fallen in love with him. The reason she had married him.

So when that openness withdrew, of course she noticed.

“What aren’t you saying?” she asked.

“I’m fine. Do you want to sit for a minute, or should we unpack the trailer?” Tommy smiled, but she had seen that particular smile before.

Kate tapped his chest with one finger, hard. “What aren’t you saying, Tom?”

He exhaled. Rolled his eyes a little. At himself, she knew—not at her. “It’s ridiculous.”

“Nothing I love more than ‘ridiculous.’”

Kate had never been the kind of woman who retreated in conversation. Tommy knew that.

“Okay, look, don’t freak out, but when we were standing in the doorway, I looked up the stairs and I thought I saw someone up there.”

Kate cocked her head. “You saw someone, or you thought you saw someone? It could be the real estate broker. Franca. Or a nosy neighbor or someone squatting in the house.”

“I caught a glimpse, just for a second, and then it wasn’t there. So either I’m imagining things or we have a ghost.”

Kate arched an eyebrow. “Okay. Let’s hope it’s a ghost. We can do our own reality show, like a mix of ghost hunting, European travel, and old-house restoration.”

“I’m in,” Tommy said. “But before we make our millions on that, maybe we should unpack. I do have to get the trailer back to Catania tomorrow.”

She kissed him, and they spent a few moments lost in that kiss. The breeze came over the edge of the cliff, and the bougainvillea rustled where it wound across the face of the house. As the scent of the flowers filled her thoughts, the trepidation the quake had caused began to melt away at last.

Kate smiled when she thought of her mother, who had assumed something had gone wrong in their marriage, because they were so excited about making a new start in a foreign country. To her generation, it was the sort of thing people only did for a good job or if they were running away from something. Kate had sought kind ways to explain that her and Tommy’s generation didn’t want to be anything like earlier generations. Kate and Tommy wanted a better life, simpler, where they could put their happiness and the quality of their life above work. Her mom had assumed that one of them had been unfaithful or something like that, but this was the opposite of marital trouble. It was a shared striving for the future. The world seemed to be unraveling every day. American culture seemed to be rotting from the inside out, manipulated by an amoral oligarchy whose worst enemy was young people who didn’t want to play their game, and Kate and Tommy were happy to be counted in that category. The irony had not been lost on them, that the nineteenth and twentieth centuries had been defined by people leaving the so-called Old World to seek their fortunes in the New World, and now she and Tommy were doing the opposite, seeking new life in the Old World. But they both believed that earlier generations had it right—a slower life, a smaller circle, a focus on home.

Now here they were.

Home.

Tommy unlocked the back of the trailer. Each of them hefted a box, and they crossed the threshold of their new home a second time, this one more slowly and contentedly. As they stepped into the foyer, Kate glanced at the top of the stairs. She didn’t believe in ghosts, but they were in the Old World now, and things like that seemed so much more possible here. Fortunately, she saw only dust and gloom, and both of those could be taken care of with a little time and effort.

“All right, woman,” Tommy said, “let’s see those muscles in action.”

Kate flexed and put on her meanest weight-lifting face. She stayed in the pose while Tommy kissed her forehead and ran his hands appreciatively along her arms. The tan and the tank top helped, but mostly it was deadlifting and boxing that gave her the definition he admired.

“You’re cute,” she said, “but don’t think that means I won’t lean on archaic stereotypes to make you carry the heaviest stuff.”

With a flourish of his hand, Tommy gave a small bow. “After you, my love.”

And the unloading began.

When they had made the decision to move across the ocean, Kate had worried about the cost involved in taking their belongings with them. Like most people, she had become accustomed to the habit of attributing importance to the ownership of things, but once they had begun debating over pieces of furniture and looking into the cost of shipping, the conversation changed. Tommy would say they needed to bring the small antique kitchen set that had been in his own kitchen when he was growing up, and Kate would ask why. Kate would say she wanted to ship the rocking chair she had acquired from her grandmother’s house after the lovely old Irish woman’s death, and Tommy would ask why. The answers were always sentimental rather than practical, and fairly quickly, they realized that some of those pieces could be given to other relatives or friends. Knowing they were still in the hands of someone who would appreciate them was almost as good as holding on to them. Other objects could be sold or discarded or donated.

Clothes went the same way. Both of them had closets full of things they’d held on to because they still fit, or might one day fit, but hadn’t worn in a long time. They were starting a new life, and the last thing they needed was to carry the clutter of the old one along with them. That left four big duffel bags, two fat suitcases, and three carry-ons. Most of their shoes—mostly Kate’s, if they were being honest—had been shipped over and would arrive with the cherry sleigh bed that had been a wedding gift from Kate’s parents, along with a few other antiques and several paintings, things that their hearts could not leave behind.

That would be just the beginning of the long process of furnishing their new home’s fifteen rooms. Kate still could not quite wrap her head around the size of the rambling old house. Some rooms were already furnished, but she was in no rush to get the place completely decorated. The process would be part of the pleasure of this new life. They had each taken a month’s sabbatical from their jobs, with three weeks still to go, and that would be time enough to make a decent start of it.

Now, as Kate and Tommy unloaded the trailer, she smiled with each lamp and end table and old chair they brought in. Kate had opened half a dozen windows before they started bringing anything through the door, but by the time they maneuvered the antique kitchen table inside, she realized it had been a mistake not to be more thorough. A sheen of sweat covered her, a trickle traced the length of her spine. Her upper lip had grown damp, and she wiped her hand across her mouth with a shudder of revulsion. Sweaty upper lips were supposed to be the province of the elderly, at least in her mind. Sicily had a rustic, primal romantic quality. So much of the island made her feel as if they were stepping back in time to a simpler era. Even in tourist spots like Taormina, overlooking the ocean, the pace of life felt so much slower. That was what had drawn her to push Tommy into this decision. So many pressures of the modern world felt distant and unimportant here.

That was the life she wanted for herself and Tommy, and the reason she had reacted immediately when she received the junk email promoting Mayor Brancati’s plan. She received a dozen such emails every day, but that one had quickened her pulse and sent her searching online real estate listings. Tommy’s childhood visits to Becchina had been some of the happiest times of his life. He had often regaled her with tales of the food he’d eaten, the music in the streets, and the way his parents had laughed together in the days before their marriage fell apart. Then his father had a falling-out with his family in Sicily, and even mentioning Becchina had become a little like farting in church. When his father died, his mother had taken Tommy to Becchina once, out of obligation, and then had been constantly resentful of her son’s interest in his Sicilian family, jealous of his love for his grandparents, whom she insisted were practically strangers who had alienated their only son. Tommy’s father.

Mostly, Tommy had told Kate, his mother had wanted his affection for herself. After her death, grief and guilt had weighed on him. She had brainwashed him throughout his life to feel as if he were someone responsible for her emotional well-being, and though her death should have freed him from that, somehow it had done the opposite. His mother’s death had left Tommy feeling as if he had somehow let her down in ways he would now never be able to cure, even though he knew he had been a good son.

Kate thought of Sicily as a new world. A new life. A kinder, slower-paced existence where she could build a future and a family with a husband who would be a good man and a reliable partner. All the things her father had not been.

She knew most of her friends would have been terrified to take such a leap of faith in a spouse or any one person. But the heat and vivid life of Sicily, the seaside spots and mountain views, all combined to give them both what they needed: freedom and a chance to have a loving, uncomplicated family for Tommy and a new start without family baggage for Kate.

It was their shared dream.

Now they were here. It was reality, instead of a dream. And it was hot as hell.

“We need to open the rest of the windows.” She rested against the corner of the table.

“Can we get this into the kitchen first?” Tommy asked, using his T-shirt to wipe his forehead.

Kate slumped a bit. “I honestly don’t think so.”

He smiled that tired smile she loved so much. It was the smile that indulged her, the one that said, Okay, babe, if it’s important to you, then it’s important to me. The little kitchen table was a perfect example. The beautiful floral design work had been hand-painted at least eighty years ago, and it had faded so much that it almost looked like the memory of flowers instead of actual paint. It had cost a bit more than they had wanted to spend, but Kate had fallen in love with it.

“Okay. Windows it is,” Tommy said.

They left the table where it was and split up, wandering through the house. While Tommy started for the kitchen, propping open doors along the way, Kate mounted the stairs. She blew a few strands of hair away from her face, wondering what summer would really be like in Sicily. If nothing else, she would have to become less self-conscious about sweating.

I’ll sweat out the bad stuff, she thought. Toxins, pollution, extra pounds. There would be a lot of carbs on the menu here—just part of life in Sicily—but she knew they would be so much healthier. They would eat better and walk everywhere, and they would drink wine and make love with the ceiling fan in the bedroom twirling lazily as if they’d stepped back in time.

Jesus, she thought. Is this what happiness feels like?

All she’d had to do was leave the New World for the Old. And endure a little earthquake.

The floorboards creaked underfoot. Downstairs, with a few windows open, the breeze moved the air around, but up here it felt hot and stale, claustrophobic in spite of the size of the place. Franca must have sent a cleaning crew in, because the house had been dusted and swept, cobwebs removed from the corners. There were three bedrooms on this floor and a bathroom with an enormous cast-iron tub. The place had no shower, but sometime in the 1970s, a handheld showerhead had been installed, along with a curtain to keep the splashing to a minimum if someone wanted to clean up without having to fill the tub.

“File under: it seemed like a good idea at the time,” Kate muttered to herself.

A gust of wind made the window in the bathroom rattle. The house groaned with age. She struggled with the lock for a moment, but once she slid the window up, the breeze washed through the bathroom and out into the corridor. Somewhere, a door slammed shut, and she jumped, a little squeak escaping her lips.

“Old houses,” she whispered, and it came out like a curse.

Moving through the second floor and then up to the third, she opened one window after another. There were only two rooms on the third floor—one a slant-roofed bedroom and the other full of empty bookshelves. Once upon a time, it had been a study or a little library. Empty bookshelves saddened her, but Kate promised herself they would not stay empty for long. As she raised the last window, she leaned on the sill and let herself breathe. The smell of flowers reached her even up here, and she leaned against the doorframe and let herself begin to think of this place as home.

Out in the hall, the floor creaked with the weight of footsteps. Tommy had come up to check on her.

She stepped into the hall. “I’m here.”

But Tommy wasn’t.

It had just been the house groaning again.

Kate descended toward the second floor. “I told you this place was haunted!” she called down.

“This old, it has to be!” Tommy replied, his voice floating from the first floor. Clean as the house seemed, dust motes danced in the air, somehow reminding her of how large the place really was.

At the landing, she hesitated. Straight ahead, at the far end of the second-floor corridor, was a narrow door to which she had paid very little attention. Had she even noticed it when they had toured the house? Kate didn’t think so. And when she had come up the stairs a few minutes ago, the afternoon sunlight reaching in from the bedrooms had obscured the shadowy parts of the corridor, where the light did not reach.

Now she wondered where the narrow door might lead. There were other rooms in the annex at the back of the house, a later addition, only accessible by passing through the kitchen. Perhaps the little door led to servants’ stairs, down to the kitchen and those back rooms. Did houses—even big ones—in tiny Sicilian hill towns have servants’ stairs? Had people here ever had the money to afford servants?

Kate started toward the narrow door.

Downstairs, something thumped loudly.

She flinched and turned toward the sound.

“Tommy?”

“It’s the front door,” he called.

Kate frowned. They’d been here for little more than an hour. Who could be pounding on their door? Her first thought was Signora Housecoat, the creepy old lady down the street who had practically shunned Kate on sight, but then she realized that anyone who so obviously disapproved of her new neighbors was not going to show up as the welcome wagon.

Little door forgotten, she trotted downstairs just as Tommy opened the front door. For a half second, Kate thought she’d been wrong, that it really was the weird old lady down the street who’d come knocking. Short and stout, curly gray hair in a bun, a frumpy blue dress that wouldn’t have been out of place on a retired nun.

But then Tommy laughed in delight, opened his arms, and stepped out to embrace her.

“Nonna! You didn’t even give us a chance to bring everything inside!”

The old woman stiffened as Tommy hugged her. There might have been the hint of a smile, but her consternation erased it before it could reach full bloom. In the midst of the hug, Nonna’s gaze locked onto Kate, but it was difficult to interpret the emotion in the old woman’s eyes. Angry, frustrated, fearful . . . whatever those eyes were trying to say, they were not happy. This was not the reception Kate had expected, or hoped for, from the woman whom Tommy loved so much.

Nonna extricated herself from Tommy’s hug. She placed her left palm on his chest as if appealing to his heart. Nonna started with a torrent of Italian, only a few words of which Kate could make out. She and Tommy had both been studying the language since making their decision, but learning online was different from trying to interpret the rapid-fire admonitions of a native speaker. And they were admonitions, of that much Kate could be sure. Lots of questions. She heard the words for house and a demand to know why Tommy hadn’t told his grandparents this was the house they were buying.

Tommy finally took both of the old woman’s hands in his own. “Nonna, stop. English, please. Or at least speak more slowly.”

Frustrated, the old woman took a deep breath. She let him grip her hands, even squeezed back. “Tommaso,” she said. “This here. This is not the house for you.”

“I know it’s not the house we planned to buy,” Tommy replied. “But the real estate agent—Franca—she showed us this one the morning before we left, and it’s incredible! It’s twice the size of the other one, and it stands on its own. And the view! And the flowers!”

“Flowers!” Nonna said, almost spitting the word, apparently disgusted that something so trivial could come into this conversation.

Kate decided it was time to intervene. She emerged from the house. Nonna backed away as if she feared Kate would strike her. What the hell? Kate felt stung by this. She had never given the old woman anything but her love, and when she and Tommy had left here months ago, after telling his grandparents they would be moving to Becchina, the old woman had wept with happiness. Her smile had been full of the kind of joy that usually only accompanied announcements of a baby on the way, and why not? Her only child—Tommy’sfather—had been dead for years. She had been thrilled, had treated Kate like her own blood.

Now she backed away, off the stoop, as if Kate were on fire. The look of fear—because now her expression was perfectly clear—remained on her face for several long seconds before the old woman turned away as if to conceal what she could not otherwise hide.

“Nonna,” Kate said, following her.

Tommy only watched them both in confusion.

“Nonna,” Kate said again, taking her arm.

The old woman took a deep breath as if to steady herself, lifted her chin, and turned to face Kate. “This is bad.”

Something in her voice made Kate shiver. The elderly were often superstitious, and in her life, she had not met anyone with more superstitions than these old Sicilians. They believed in the evil eye and thought it was bad luck for a woman to give a man shoes in fear that he would walk away from her. God forbid someone give knives as a wedding gift; the marriage would end in violence and bloodshed. These were things Tommy’s grandparents and their friends actually believed.

“Please, Nonna,” Kate said. “Come inside and see for yourself. The house is beautiful, and there are so many rooms. Plenty of space for Tommy and me to do our jobs—”

“Plenty of room for great-grandchildren,” Tommy added.

Kate smiled, knowing that was an irresistible hook for the old woman. She wasn’t quite sure what their plans were for babies just yet, but she knew a winning argument when she heard one.

“Exactly!” she said, putting a hand on the old woman’s arm. “Come and see. Lots of room for kids.”

Nonna pulled her arm away. Her deeply lined, dark-skinned face flushed red.

“No! No babies here,” she said firmly. Her rheumy hazel eyes locked onto Kate and then Tommy before she muttered a string of sentences that didn’t seem like modern Italian. More like the old Sicilian dialect she’d grown up speaking. “You come eat,” she said. “Seven o’clock.”

Silence fell among them. A hot breeze came up over the cliff at the end of the road and swirled the scent of the house’s flowers all around. It should have been a perfect moment, but it thrummed with the anxiety and discontent Nonna had brought with her.

“Okay,” Tommy said. “Seven o’clock.”

Nonna did not glance at the house again or even spare another look at her grandson and his wife, who had moved across the world to start their lives over in a place where they would be near family who loved them. Now they stood and watched her march off down the road with the ticktock gait common to thickly built women of a certain age.

“Well,” Kate said. “That was fucking weird.”

4

On a little street that angled out from the church square at the center of town, the important parts of life in Becchina carried on, despite the population drain of recent decades. To find a full-size supermarket, they would have to drive more than twenty minutes, but a little grocery store called Cannistraro Alimentari had most of what they would need. The aisles were narrow, and the stock seemed arranged with no perceivable logic, but they had a little of everything, and the produce section overflowed with fresh fruits and vegetables.

Across from Cannistraro’s was a small bookshop that sold newspapers and magazines in a variety of languages. On either side of the bookshop, there was a bakery. Parziale’s seemed as if it had been there since the town’s first stones had been laid, and according to the sign, it had been owned by the same family since 1892. The other one, Caffe Sicilia, served coffee but couldn’t quite be called a café. It was mostly just a counter where you could order things to carry out, but Caffe Sicilia’s sign was newer, fancier, and both the owners and the clientele looked younger. It seemed there was a kind of generational battle going on here, and although the smell of baking bread made him ravenous, Tommy didn’t dare choose a side in this bakery war without first finding out if his family had an allegiance to one or the other. Nonna already disapproved of the choices he and Kate had made, and it was only the first day.