Jon Tracy - The Rome Prophecy

This guy is Mr Nothing.

Federico wanders into the next room.

The bedroom doesn’t even have a bed. Only a mattress on the floor.

No sheets.

He pulls open a small built-in wardrobe.

The search team have already stripped it of clothes and shoes.

It’s empty, except for some old sheets of newspaper lining the bottom.

He lifts some up.

They’re not old papers.

They’re pages from bibles.

Hundreds and hundreds of pages from dozens of different bibles.

‘It’s all going to be okay. I can help you. God will protect you.’

Tom moves his chair so that Anna can only see him and is not distracted by Louisa or Valentina. ‘I know you believe in God, that you pray to Him and that you trust in Him.’

Anna holds his hand as tightly as she can, but it’s a grip of fear rather than reassurance. She’s on the brink of tears.

Stress is building rather than subsiding.

‘Are you all right?’ asks Tom gently.

‘They’re going to kill me.’ The first tear rolls down her left cheek. ‘Please don’t let them kill me.’

Tom strokes the back of her hand. ‘No one’s going to hurt you.’

‘They have to. They say they have to.’

‘Who, Anna? Who has to?’

‘The Galli and the Sisters.’ She sniffs and reaches towards a box of tissues. ‘I know they’ll kill me.’

Tom stretches, picks up the box and hands over several of the soft white tissues. ‘No one’s going to harm you, I promise.’

Her mood changes.

She looks angry and speaks in a strange and hostile voice.

‘Anna has wronged us. She is sacer! Mater says we must take those who are given to the gods and bury them alive around the sacred walls of our womb.’

Meekly Anna responds to the new alter. ‘I’ve done nothing wrong.’

The angry voice counters, ‘You are a threat to us, a threat to our existence here in the womb and to the discovery of the book.’

‘I am no threat!’ the quieter voice pleads. ‘And it is no womb. The place you hold me in is an infernal cell, a cave in the depths of Hades!’

‘Be careful, sister, or by morning you will find earth in your mouth. Now come with us.’

‘No! I hate it there. Leave me alone.’

The two voices almost overlap now, the words fast and furious, a verbal stream of inner turmoil. There is no difference between them in tone. ‘You will never be alone, we will always be with you, in your sight and in your spirit.’

‘Let me be! I’m frightened of this darkness. Please let me out, let me go outside.’

‘There is no outside for those who are not with us.’

‘Enough!’ shouts Louisa. She’s out of her seat and pushing her way past Valentina and Tom.

Anna lashes out. ‘Be gone! I will feed you to the dog with three heads.’

‘There is no dog! You are making it all up to frighten us.’

‘Great Cerberus can already taste your blood and bones.’

Louisa pulls an emergency cord dangling from the ceiling. She turns to Tom and Valentina. ‘Please leave the room, and let me deal with this.’

They back slowly away, both uncertain whether Louisa can really handle the situation.

Anna’s eyes are bulging, her face flushed with blood. The alters are battling for control of her.

‘Mother is coming for you. Mother is mad at you.’

‘She’s not real. I don’t believe in her.’

‘She can hear you, Anna. She can hear you and she’s going to punish you.’

Tom and Valentina are brushed aside as nurses and the duty doctor rush into the room. From outside the glass they watch Anna being pinned down and sedated.

Finally Louisa emerges.

She’s scarlet with anger.

‘You don’t care, do you? You just don’t care about anything or anyone other than yourselves and your stupid case.’

‘Calm down.’ Valentina takes a step back so the clinician is less in her face.

‘Calm down?’ Louisa can’t believe her ears. ‘I just had to panic-call a doctor to sedate my patient. She’s torn the stitches in the arm that we had to sew up after she almost killed herself, and you – you ask me to calm down!’

Valentina is unfazed. ‘I’m not asking you, I’m telling you.’

Louisa steps into her space again. ‘In here, you don’t tell me anything. In here, care for the patient comes first, way before what you want and your blessed criminal investigation.’

She turns and storms off down the corridor.

Tom and Valentina are left standing next to the Carabinieri guard minding the room. Green curtains have now been pulled around the windows, but there’s a gap big enough to see the medical team finishing the patch-up job on the strangest patient ever to occupy a bed in ICU.

‘What now?’ asks Tom.

Valentina shakes her head. ‘Good question. What indeed?’

Only when they get out of the pressure-cooker heat of the hospital and stand in the cold fresh air does Valentina realise exactly what she and Tom have to do next.

‘Shopping,’ she announces, with a certain sense of fun. ‘We’ve got to go shopping.’

She zaps open the Fiat and adds, ‘You look ridiculous in those things that you’re wearing, and I feel filthy in this stuff. I haven’t worn the same clothes for two days running since I first slept over at a boyfriend’s house.’

Tom opens the passenger door. ‘And that was how long ago?’

She grins at him over the car roof. ‘Ex-boyfriends are not the kind of thing a lady talks about.’

And that’s the best Tom can get out of her.

The journey into the city doesn’t take long, but Valentina spends a large part of it making calls.

Calls to fix a new place for them to sleep that night.

To her insurance company to inform them about the blaze at her apartment.

To Federico.

‘You okay?’ she asks Tom, as she finally hangs up. ‘You look lost in thought, and not a particularly pleasant one.’

‘It’s not.’

He watches a scooter almost rip off the passenger-side wing mirror. ‘We should think about some of the things Anna said.’

‘In particular?’

He’s not sure how much to speculate and how much to keep to himself. ‘You know how you and Louisa have been discussing whether Anna was abused as a kid, maybe by her own mother?’

‘It seems a way to explain her multiple personalities.’

‘Well, she mentioned sisters today. Did you notice?’

‘I did, but I couldn’t work out whether she meant blood sisters or sisters in some kind of organisation or movement.’

‘Neither could I,’ admits Tom. ‘Either way, she was indicating that whatever horror she’s mixed up in, there are other women involved. Maybe they’re at risk as well.’

‘Only women,’ notes Valentina.

Tom has to think back. ‘No. Not true. She mentioned Galli.’

She’s none the wiser. ‘And Galli is who?’ She slips the Fiat into a parking bay at Carabinieri HQ. ‘I’ve never heard of him before.’

‘Them, not he.’ Tom unbuckles his seat belt and waits until they’re both out of the Punto before he completes the explanation. ‘They were priests. Eunuch priests who existed hundreds of years before Christ. By the way, where are we going?’

She takes his hand. ‘Not far. Don’t worry, we’ll soon have you properly dressed. Eunuch priests? Did you know any?’

‘I knew some who should have been eunuchs.’ Before Tom can continue, a waft of wind fills his pink parachute of a shirt and puffs him up like the Michelin Man. It gives Valentina a fit of the giggles while she pats it flat. ‘Let’s hurry up; you must be freezing without a coat.’

‘No, I’m fine; I’m a super-tough American, remember.’