Rags & Bones: New Twists on Timeless Tales (27 page)

“Fine.”

“Fine.”

“Midnight. That’s what it says.”

“Midnight.”

“See you then.”

“Same here.”

They stood there in the dark heat, until Theo switched off the computer and yanked the plug
out of the adapter in the wall.

When he looked back up, Isabella was gone.

The wind slammed the door, louder than a shot, faster than a bullet. It was enough to drive a normal person crazy.

This time, Theo didn’t so much as flinch.

IV. Il Castello (The Castle)

Even the stones were hot beneath Theo’s feet in the darkness. He could feel himself sweating as he reached the top of the hill, even
if he couldn’t see it. It didn’t matter. He could feel it, the wind at his throat—its fingers around his neck.

He couldn’t breathe without knowing it was there.

And I’m here, too.

He stared up at the Castello Aragonese. It may not have been all that impressive on its own, but the dark splotch of crumbling stone towers and cannonballs—twisting passageways and ancient turrets—blocked out even
the moon, from where Theo stood.

How strange, he thought, to be standing here, in the middle of the night, in the center of the piazza, in the heart of town, in the heel of the boot—and facing—what?

For the first time, Theodore Gray had absolutely no idea.
Not about what had happened, not about what would happen. Not even about what was happening.

He didn’t know if that was good or bad, but
it was something.

It was new.

“I didn’t think you were going to make it.” Isabella hung back in the shadows of the castle wall. It took a moment for Theo’s eyes to adjust, but they did. She was dark and outlined in darkness. Something slight and shadowy, just like everything else around her.

He drew a breath. “I made it. This isn’t a movie. In real life, people make it when they say they’re
going to make it.”

“Not all people,” she said, softly.

“I do.” He looked at her.

“And the wind doesn’t push over trailers?” She looked like she was about to cry.

“No.” Theo swallowed. “Not usually.”

She looked away. “You sure, Theo? You want to do this? I mean, I don’t blame you if you don’t. It’s a lot to handle. For either one of us.”

Theo felt in his pocket for Dante’s key—the only key
to the castle, the one he’d had to drag out of Dante’s hands in exchange for his brand-new phone. The deal had taken longer than he’d thought, and he almost hadn’t made it all the way up the hill to the castle in time.

Standing here right now he almost wished he hadn’t.

Theo pulled the key out now, looking at her. “Do I want to do this? I’m pretty sure I don’t. Yet here we are.”

Isabella nodded,
taking the key out of his hand. “Well, then.” She shoved the key into the lock. Rattled it, up and down. The chains fell, clanging, to the cobblestone ground beneath them.

Isabella threw her small body against the gate, and it creaked slowly open, just a few inches at a time.

It’s ironic, Theo thought, how quickly some chains fall. While others—

She smiled at him. “After you.”

A strangely
hollow feeling overtook Theo, but when Isabella turned back to him, she didn’t look especially like herself, either. It was like they’d both been cast in someone else’s haunted, horrid ghost story.

“Do you hear something?” He stopped himself, his hand on the door.

She shrugged. “Some sort of bird, I think. Or an alley cat.”

“It sounded like crying,” said Theo.

“More like screaming,” Isabella
said, listening, her head crooked like a bird.

“We could go home,” he said. “It’s not too late.”

But it was.

A horror movie, that was this story.
The Castle of Otranto. Of course.

Wasn’t that why he was here, for the longest, hottest summer of his seventeen years?

“Come on, then. What are you waiting for?” She tossed her hair and disappeared into the darkness, before his eyes.

He followed
her into the night.

Inside the castle, it looked like oblivion—if oblivion looked like fog, Theo thought. Fog, billowing aimlessly toward nowhere in particular. That was how he’d become used to feeling; it was also how he felt, standing in the central courtyard of the Castello Aragonese.

Isabella didn’t wait for him. She took off into the shadows, while Theo felt like his feet had been somehow
glued into the very foundation of the Castello itself. Frozen in place.

He looked up at the soaring stone walls that rose into the
darkness around him. One floor, two, three, four—the many stairwells connecting the castle turrets to each other were largely hidden from sight now. He could see Isabella only from a distance now, a glimpse here and there as her T-shirt caught the moonlight on the
stairs.

“Isabella! What are you doing? Come on, now—”

She didn’t answer, and she didn’t stop. She was heading for the castle roof, Theo knew that much. He recognized the path she was taking; he’d taken it himself, the night they shot the death scene, with Pippa and Sir Manny.

With Connie, and all the blood.

Fake blood
, he reminded himself.
No use freaking out about it now.

Then he started
up the stairs after her.

He wasn’t scared.

He kept his eyes on his feet for no particular reason, other than that it was difficult to go up the stairs in the pitch-dark.

Thinking this, he stopped and drew a lighter from his pocket, flicking it open.

The small splotch of light spluttered into an unsteady, pale glow.

I’m not scared.

“Isabella, wait!”

I’m not.

That’s what he thought, when
he mounted the final stair to the Castello roof.

That’s what he thought, when he passed the dark
falconieri
, the small alcove where the falcon trainer usually slept, when a scene called for birds on set.

That’s what he thought, when he saw Isabella standing on the edge of the stone roof, holding on to a thin, iron rail that rose from the blocky floor like a silver antenna.

That’s what he thought
when the wind whipped her long black skirt, fanning her hair out into the sky behind her.

“Oh my god. Come here,” she said, without turning to Theo. “Come see. You have to see.”

He took a step closer, like someone in a dream, in a trance. “What, Isabella? What are you saying?”

He reached out for her hand, and she took it, twisting her head toward him.

Bringing her lips to his.

She kissed
him, sweetly, as if no one in the world existed, except the two of them—not even the two of them.

I love you,
he thought.
I love you, and you’re real, and I’m not scared. My father’s not down there, and neither is yours. Connie isn’t dead, and I’m not here, and we’re on a train,
he thought.
We’re on a train to Rome.

We’ve escaped.

That’s what he was thinking as he stepped up next to her, a
giant black bird circling in the air around them.

We can escape.

That’s what he was thinking as she took his arm, silver in the moonlight, and the black feathers blew in the wind, surrounding them.

We—

V. Il Falconieri (The Falconer)

In the distance, a bird shrieked. It sounded like a scream, like a child crying. It didn’t matter; the sirocco wind took the sound away—that sound, and every
other sound the moonlight and the midnight hid between them.

No one was listening.

Not anymore.

The boy from the café and the girl from the train lay unconscious on the cobblestone, far beneath the parapet. Only a few black feathers to break their fall.

No one noticed.

Not yet.

No one except the Elephant Woman, who stood on the blood-stained rocks near the harbor, below the castle, below
the empty trailers, below the deserted set.

Holding out her hand, waiting for the black-feathered creature to return.

He had done well, Dante, her faithful. He was the lord of the castle, not anyone else. By sunrise, he would lose his feathers and his true shape, and return to his human form once again. Just as he had been for hundreds of years now.

They would go now, the
americani
. The two
of them would be left alone—as they should be. That was their birthright, just as it had been her mother’s, and her grandmother’s, and her grandmother’s grandmother before that. They alone were the Keepers of the Castello, Keepers of the Curse.

The Castello Aragonese would be locked again, and soon. It would never belong to anyone but the two of them, not really.

“Dante! Dante, bravo ragazzo!
Bravo!”

When she smiled, her teeth were ivory and gold.

A
UTHOR’S
N
OTE
…………………………………

The first time I read Horace Walpole’s
The Castle of Otranto
, I was a graduate student. The second time, I was on my way to the real Castle of Otranto itself, as part of an artists’ colony for the month of June. The Castello Aragonese, as it is locally known, is the only castle in the ancient, walled city of Otranto, a truly quirky town in a largely rural part of
Italy known as Salento, or Puglia. This land, with its ancient shrines and churches and rocky sea caves and mysterious Stonehenge-like dolmen, is an old, old place—a mystical place, where things start and grow, where anything can happen, and where the sun colors everything it touches with a kind of earthy truth. As Otranto was where I began to write what would become my first completed novel, I
now regard
The Castle of Otranto
as not just the first Gothic novel, but as the cousin of my own Gothic first novel. In the preceding pages, my Otranto has been recast for a modern setting, inspired by not just Walpole’s Otranto, but by a love of all things Gothic and Southern Gothic, a recent brush with the world of film production, and, of course, four blissful summers at the Castello Aragonese
itself. So, in that ancient southeastern light, I leave you with my modern spaghetti Gothic, “Sirocco.”

The Shaving of Shagpat
by George Meredith (1856). When the publication in 1704 of Antoine Galland’s translation of The Arabian Nights proved immensely popular, it was followed by more collections (Turkish Tales in 1707 and Persian Tales in 1714), which proved to be just as commercially successful, and the exotic oriental fantasy was here to stay. Meredith himself became a prolific author of serious
contemporary love stories and of sonnets, but it is for his first book that anyone interested in fantasy literature remembers him. He was twenty-five when he wrote it, a newlywed with a young child, and was perhaps hoping to catch the coattails of the boom in orientalism that so captivated the Western world. Whatever his hopes were, the novel flopped badly, and it quickly made its way to the
remainder stalls, and Meredith never wrote another fantasy. His tale, though, is lovely, teeming with colorful supernatural events and monstrous jinn, lush with oriental scenery and vivid characters. The adventure gives us a heroic barber who seeks to follow the seemingly helpful advice of the sorceress Noorna bin Noorka, and shave the celebrated and revered Shagpat, the son of Shimpoor, the son
of Shoolpi, the son of Shullum, “a veritable miracle of hairiness.” There is a profusion of “jeweled cities far,” and enormous armies that raise the desert into crimson dust, withered crones with joints as sharp as a grasshopper’s, and a lofty mountain “by day a peak of gold, and by night a point of solitary silver.” Through it all, Meredith’s ironic wit is a pure delight, rewarding the reader’s time
with a singular vision of a world that never actually existed.

—Charles Vess.

M
ELISSA
M
ARR

Tonight, unlike every other night I have walked on the shore, a man stands on the beach near my hiding place. I can’t pass him. He lifts his hands, palms open, and holds them out to his sides to show me that he is harmless. If he weren’t looking at me so fixedly, I might believe him, but I don’t think I should trust this one.

He is young, maybe nineteen, and fit. In the
water, I could escape him, but we are standing on the sand. He has dark trousers and a black shirt; the only lightness is his pale blond hair. I hadn’t seen it, hadn’t seen him, until I was almost upon the crevice. Until this moment, until him, I’d been singing along with the steady rising and falling of the waves as they stretched toward the sand and fell short. Now I stand bare under moon and sky
on a beach, and this stranger stares at me with a look of hunger.

No, I do not believe he is harmless at all.

“I won’t hurt you,” he lies.

Something in his voice feels like it wants to be truth, but I shiver all the same. I hadn’t expected anyone to be on the beach at this hour, and I’m not sure what to do about the man who stands watching me with such intensity that I want to flee. Men do
not look at you like that without wanting something, and in their wanting, they often hurt. My mother told me that truth
long before I ever set foot on the shore. It is why I am careful when I come here.