5.
November 1, 1283. Brianza.
Graziella’s face kept shifting. One second she would have the eyes of a crone and the mouth of a twenty year old; the next she would have the thick black and purple flecked hair of her younger appearance with the wrinkled face of her older one. It changed so quickly and so haphazardly that Alice wondered if she had completely lost control of her glamours.
“Signora,” Alice began, still trying to pull free of the apparently deranged woman dragging her by the elbow. “Signora, are you all right?”
She didn’t answer. She simply held tight to Alice’s arm and barreled back to the cabin, throwing open the door and startling Bethania and Nicky away from the hearth.
“Graziella?” Bethania asked in the exact same careful, but obviously frightened tone that Alice had used moments before. “Your face...”
More than anything, Alice wanted to gather Nicky up into her arms and hide in the back room until this all blew over, but she could barely bring herself to move. The witch had clearly lost her mind. Upon letting go of Alice’s elbow, she had gone straight to the bookcase and began pulling books off at a terrifying pace. Nick raced over to Alice, who gripped his shoulders tight.
“Are you looking for the grimoire?” Bethania asked, still keeping her voice calm, trying to soothe her agitated sister in law. “I-”
“Where the hell is it?” Graziella practically growled.
Alice had never seen the old witch act this way. She had always been an annoying enigma, but now the angry fear was on display, plain as day, even as her other features formed and faded and blurred. She gripped Nick’s shoulders tighter, trying to breath lest the panic move to her as well. She already felt her heart beginning to race for no discernible reason.
“I was showing some things to Nico,” Bethania said in a halting voice. She scooped it up and rushed the volume over to Graziella who clutched it to her chest. Relief seemed to rush over her, the shape and lines of her face settling into a more solid form. “Graziella, please, what’s happened?”
“My dream frightened her,” Alice answered. “It was...a set of doors.”
Bethania frowned. Her nose crinkled as she stared into Alice’s face. Without another word, she went to Graziella and helped her into a chair, just as she had done earlier. “Can you get her something to drink?”
Alice couldn’t move. She didn’t feel that same compassion toward Graziella. All she could feel was fear gripping her heart. Thoughts of Henry’s long gone outbursts began racing behind her eyes. “They were just doors,” she muttered. That hadn’t been the disturbing part of the dream at all. It had just been the simplest to imagine in the water. “They were just doors.”
Graziella make a sort of half-cough, half-scoffing sound at the same time that Alice felt Nick straining to get out of her grip. She let go and once again repeated, louder and firmer, “They were just doors.”
Nick brought some of the now chilled wine over to the chair, which Graziella drank down with a fierce thirst.
“Not just any doors,” she rasped. “Those are the doors of the Chaos Gate.”
The words meant nothing. Alice looked to Bethania, checking to see what her reaction was supposed to be, but her earlier incarnation just wore the same confused expression she was sure decorated her own face. For a moment, she felt a strange solidarity with her 13th century twin. Sure she grew up in this time, but Bethania didn’t know much more about Graziella and her world than she did. Graziella was something older, something different. Alice couldn’t believe it had taken her this long to realize that.
Nick was the one to word the question that was on all of their lips. “What’s the Chaos Gate?” he asked, sitting at Graziella’s feet as though he expected a story. Oliver paced over as well. The three made quite the picture. It would have looked nice on the cover of a 1940s women’s magazine.
“Home,” a heavy male voice said from the doorway. Alice spun around to see Gianni standing there, axe in hand and looking grim. A chill ran through her.
Again, Alice looked to Bethania, but saw that she was also looking at her, clearly trying to gauge her expression as well. She had never felt like they were one before, but now it was palpable. “I hate to...” She began, but Gianni interrupted.
“The way home, anyway,” he said, going over to stand behind Graziella. All gruffness faded as he kissed her cheek and then the top of her head. “Why are we discussing this? Has something happened?”
“Alice has dreamt of the gate,” Graziella replied. Her voice was calm, all panic gone. Alice stepped back, confirmed in her suspicions that there was something mind control esque in the way this Gianni did business.
He turned to her then. “Signorina Peralta?”
She stepped back once more to be aligned with Bethania, another Signorina Peralta, who seemed to have taken on a glazed expression. She couldn’t read him. She couldn’t get a sense of anything but her own fear. “I dreamt that I was trying to open them.”
“And did you?” He looked curious.
“No,” she replied, shaking her head as images began to come back once again. “Johnny Appleseed stopped me.”
Nicky laughed, but the other three stared, looking her as though she had officially gone out of her mind.
“Who’s Johnny Appleseed?” Bethania ventured, her voice somewhat timid.
Alice tried not to laugh. She didn’t expect them to understand what she meant. Johnny Appleseed wouldn’t be roaming the Northwest territory for another 500 years or so, and even then they wouldn’t be likely to hear about him. “He’s...sort of an American folk hero. He...planted apple trees all through the frontier, or rather, what was the frontier at the time. It’s a fairly built up state now...or when I came from rather. I think it was a religious thing, but I don’t...you get taught about him when you’re kid.”
“And John Henry,” Nicky added with a definitive nod.
“American Gods?” Graziella asked with a laugh as she nudged Gianni.
“I don’t know if I’d quite put it that way...”
“And Paul Bunyan,” Nicky continued listing. “with his big blue ox.”
“Johnny Appleseed was a real person, though. I mean...” She knew she was floundering, but she couldn’t help it. Just looking at those two make her words jumble.
“Don’t worry about it, honey,” Graziella said, getting up from her chair and going over to take Alice’s hands. “People once called us gods too. Now they’re liable to burn us at the stake if they ever get around to finding Gianni and me up here. Myth and stories change with the times. Just cause they call me something doesn’t make it true.”
Alice allowed Graziella to lead her to the hearth where she took out the grimoire. Nicky scooted near to them, and though the fire still felt a little two warm, Alice wouldn’t have dared to move.
“How do you think magic came to be, Alice?” She stroked the cover of the leather bound book. In the center, a pressed engraving of a cylinder with three horizontal lines perpendicular to it, like the symbol on the pendant Graziella had given her, decorated the cover. Alice found she couldn’t take her eyes from the symbol.
“I never really believed in magic,” she whispered, for some reason believing such words were meant to be spoken softly.
“Not at all? Not even when you were a little girl?”
Alice tried hard to think back to a time in her childhood when she believe in fairy tales. There were traditions of course. The three wise men left epiphany presents. Superstitions too. You never put your purse on the floor lest you invite the loss of money. Her mother believed so strongly in those. Not Alice though. She kept up the wise men for Nicky, but it was weird to keep your purse in your lap at a restaurant. Until very recently, she had never thought that witches, or ghosts, or anything like all of this could possibly exist. She shook her head.
“Magic comes into this world through cracks,” Gianni began, his voice sounding rehearsed. Alice knew in an instant that he had giv
en this speech many times before. “But for us, at least, it started in our world. Our home. A place we left many, many years ago because it couldn’t keep us any longer.”
Alice watched as his face changed. A voice inside her said to look away, that this was how he had bewitched Graziella and Bethania, but she couldn’t. She had never seen another person’s eyes look so desperately sad. So, she listened as he went on.
“The earthquake came in the night. No one was prepared. Though our diviners had been predicting the destruction for several years, few were willing to believe them. We fled.” He paused, his voice faltering as he looked from Alice to Bethania, then back again.
Graziella took over. “Gianni and I fled. We were young then, all around young. His parents forbid us to go. They thought the city would be safe. But Gianni saw differently. We stole his little sister, Strenia, still fast asleep, from her bed and ran. When we saw the gates close behind us...” She turned to the first page of her grimoire, the vellum was decorated with a gilded drawing of same doors Alice had seen. There truly was a finality in the image.
“We weren’t the only ones,” Gianni continued, his voice still thinner than it had been. “Others escaped. I don’t know how many. We’re still finding out who made it. But...I don’t want to know what’s behind those doors, Alice.”
“Nothing good,” Graziella added. “Nothing good.”
The image on the page before her seemed to sing, calling to her the same way the doors in the dream did. She took a deep breath, breathing in the smell of the pages. More than anything now, she wanted to know what lay beyond those doors.
“But if it’s your home...?” Nick spoke up, sounding more concerned than curious.
“No,” Graziella said firmly. “This is our home now. Anything beyond those doors has been destroyed.”
“Then why would Alice dream about them?” Bethania asked, going to her haggard looking brother and pulling him into a hug.
Gianni shook his head as if to say he didn’t know, but Alice didn’t believe him.
“They want me to open them,” she said. Part of her said to keep quiet, that it would sound crazy, but after what Graziella and Gianni just described, she figured little could sound crazier. “Even the picture wants me to open them.”
“It must be that damn Mooreland girl!” Graziella slammed the grimoire shut and took to pacing. The fire shuddered like it wanted to extinguish itself. “She doesn’t know what she’s messing with, little harvest girl. I knew this would happen, Gianni, I knew...”
“This isn’t...”
“This is worse than what I saw!”
“I don’t think...”
But Graziella would not be dissuaded. She stopped in front of the fireplace and stared hard into the flames. “I have to go to her, Gianni. I have to go now.”
“Graziella, no.”
“If you don’t send me forward. I’ll find another way.”
Alice and Bethania looked at one another and agreed without words to take Nicky from the room. The two of them hurried him outside where snow was starting to fall.