There is a sotto-passagio that starts at the top of the Via Veneto and twists and turns underground. It is lit with flattering pink lights in a long strip on the ceiling. The passage goes past the train connections and the Roman Sports Club. Ultimately it arrives at the bottom of the Spanish Steps, saving you the cautious walk down the slippery, uneven Steps themselves. And out you go, into a different, darker Rome. Dark Rome and Other Stories is a four-part collection of twenty-three fantastical stories takes you on journeys of unforeseen resolution. "Dark Rome" offers tales of an alternate Eternal City where an ancient serpent rules a crumbling palazzo and ones fate can be decided by a single misstep. "The Day People" is an unfinished novel set in the near future, where one woman forever changes the face of humanity and bold intentions end in devastating consequences. "In Between" shares stories of the present seen through a looking glass, where ordinary things have extraordinary qualities and the female obsession with handbags is revealed as a dark quest for power. "Far Kingdoms" tells tales of other lands, populated by mysterious insect-like beings who imagine themselves to be human.

Dark Rome

And Other StoriesBy Brenda Paske

iUniverse, Inc.

Copyright © 2010 Brenda Paske
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4502-5282-9

Contents

DARK ROME..............................................1DARK ROME..............................................3THE HOUSE OF TODAY AND TOMORROW........................9THE SERPENT ARCOBALENO.................................14THE HOUSE OF THE SHAH IN SANREMO.......................22THE DAY PEOPLE.........................................27THE DAY PEOPLE.........................................29RAT ROAD(Mrs. Weisinski's Story).......................55THE BLACK BUS..........................................84SUMMER'S CHILDREN......................................93WINTER'S KING..........................................101THE WAR APARTMENT......................................106IN BETWEEN.............................................109SOULBAG................................................111THE MICHO..............................................122THE LOST...............................................133DANCE ME OUT OF HELL, PRETTY SHOES.....................137THE HOMELESS...........................................146DREAMHOUSES............................................154DEAD MAN'S FUNERAL.....................................161BILLY BADMAN...........................................172ALMOST HUMAN...........................................175FAR KINGDOMS...........................................185MIDNIGHT, CINDERELLA...................................187THE CITY OF FORGETFULNESS..............................206THE THIN MAN...........................................220SHADELAND..............................................241

Chapter One

DARK ROME

There is a sotto-passagio that starts at the top of the Via Veneto and twists and turns underground. It is lit with flattering pink lights in a long strip on the ceiling. The passage goes past the train connections and the Roman Sports Club, then finally spits you out at the bottom of the Spanish Steps, saving you the cautious walk down the slippery uneven Steps themselves.

And out you go, into a different, darker Rome.

When Lizzy went into the bathroom the emergency pull was swinging by itself.

"David! Come here."

He looked at the evidence of her stupidity with contempt. "It's the air currents." He stilled the cord, then swung the bathroom door back and forth briskly to demonstrate,

The cord didn't move an inch.

"Ghosts," thought Lizzy. Some old woman must have died in the hotel room. She had pulled the cord desperately, and no one had answered. She was pulling it still.

No one wanted to sleep there, that was why this magnificent fifth floor room with a view was still available at mid-summer, for only 150 Euro a night.

At the front desk, they said "Did you feel the earthquake?"

There's an active volcano not twenty miles from Rome that no one knows about, that no one thinks about. Not yet.

David and Lizzy walked through the misty Villa Borghese. It was 5:30 AM, long before the free hotel breakfast, long before the cafes opened, long before anything, especially in Italy. They were jet-lagged and could not sleep in their fabulous five-star hotel near the bottom of the Via Veneto, across from the church with the ossuary of the Capuchin monks cemented into its basement.

One small bent old woman was hobbling up the gravel path of the park ahead of them. Another sleepless one. They quickly overtook her. Coming the opposite direction a cold-eyed little man swept his gaze over them and then on to the old woman.

"He's going to snatch her purse," said Lizzy.

"It's not our problem."

But worried Lizzy looked back through the mists. She did not see what she expected. The man was on the ground, the old woman leaning over him. To help?

No, she leaned down shakily, reached with long twisted fingers and took something from his chest pocket. His soul? The man shuddered once and was still.

"David!"

But oblivious David has walked on.

"God, so old," remarked David callously. "Why doesn't she just die?"

"Shh, she'll hear."

"No one speaks English in Trastevere."

They were across the river, in the poor part of town. The shopkeeper was old, wrinkled and bent in the traditional way, wearing the traditional black. But perhaps not a widow. There was an old man in the dim back room of the candy shop.

"How can anyone bear to go on and on?"

"I would," said Lizzy.

She looked at his mean little eyes and finally thought the thought she had been waiting for. It's not possible to grow old with you. I will have to save myself.

"La vita e per piu potente," said the old woman, and handed Lizzy her violet-scented sweet, which she immediately ate.

Life is strong? Was that what she had said?

It was not quite what she had said.

David sniffed his candy doubtfully and threw it away, right in front of the old lady.

It was then Lizzy recognized her, the old woman, the one from the park.

David was not prepared to like Rome. It was crowded, disorganized, loud, and smelly. It was Lizzy's fault for suggesting it, of course.

Paris had been good. The City of Light and Lightness, built as it was on a shell of catacombs and sewers. Of course David had chosen that city.

And the Italian men who whistled at her new thinner figure and called her Biondina-Blondie. How angry David was. "Stop encouraging them," he hissed.

After a very late dinner he announced the coffee was undrinkable, the language incomprehensible, the exchange rate unconscionable and she was a fool for not having known it. He stomped off without looking back, knowing she had no choice but to follow.

This time Lizzy watched his receding back, going the wrong direction, saw the moment of realization when he knew she wasn't following him, or perhaps that he didn't know where he was going. An indiscernible pause, then he went on, compounding his mistake rather than admitting he was wrong.

Lizzy knew where she was, exactly, and went back along the Via Condotti to walk up the passage. It seemed to never end. The motorized walkway was broken and the tunnel seemed steeper on the way up than it had been on the way down. Had she missed her turn? Unexpectedly the tunnels were deserted at that hour. In Rome the streets are either crowded or absolutely empty.

She wasn't sure at all that they had come this way.

But then at last there were the glassed-in displays lining the passage, showing granite counter-tops, purses, exquisite shoes, tiny cabinets in tiny rooms to display the cabinet-maker's art.

And tiny people in them, dancing, talking, drinking tiny apertifs. Little women in pretty little frocks. A small man's eyes met hers, and blankly turned away.

You are dreaming ... but Lizzy knew she wasn't. The thick glass blurred her view, but she knew what she was seeing. Terrified she froze, just when she should have strolled on, pretending to have noticed nothing.

And the pink lights went off.

There was utter silence. She heard only her breathing.

Where was she going? Up the tunnel in the dark. But why go back up to her haunted hotel room, to share with an angry little man?

She turned and reached out cautiously to touch the wall in the featureless dark. With one hand in front of her and the other one brushing the wall she slowly retraced her way back to the Spanish Steps.

All the while...