The Villa(25)
Instead, I find myself drifting back upstairs to the little library and picking up Lilith Rising from 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 Rising is 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 had been 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 put Lilith Rising back 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 a V.
An M.
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.”
Pierce smiles, leaning in to kiss her softly. “You think everything I play is gorgeous.”
“Because it is,” she replies, and then she’s scooting closer, wishing the guitar weren’t between them.
Luckily, Pierce must want the same thing because she hears the twang of the strings as he places it on the floor, and then his arms are around her, their bodies pressed close.
Italy has been good for them, just like she’d hoped. A bedroom at the end of a long hall, not next to anyone else, no worry that Lara could hear them from her spot on the sofa on the other side of the thin walls of their flat. A comfortable bed, and time. That was the thing Mari craved the most, the thing she felt she and Pierce never had enough of, had never had enough of.
From the very first, every moment had been illicit and stolen, and while that had been exciting, she’s grateful for the luxury of togetherness.
“I’ve missed you,” Pierce murmurs against her neck, pushing the strap of her nightgown down, and she presses her forehead to his.
“I’ve been here the whole time.”
He looks up at her, his eyes so blue in that pale and serious face. “Have you?” he asks.
She knows he’s talking about Billy. How losing their baby turned her into a ghost for months on end. But that memory belongs to cold gray England, not to this sunny bedroom in Italy, and she pushes it away even as she pulls Pierce closer.
“All right now, plenty of time for that later!”
There’s a loud rapping at the door, and Mari looks over her shoulder to see Noel standing there in the doorway.
“It’s not even noon, you heathens,” he says, and Mari scowls at him, pulling her nightgown back up her shoulder.
“Closed doors mean something, Noel,” she says, and he gives one of those elegant shrugs she’s seen so many times over the past few weeks since they arrived.