Valentino was used to covering up his bruises. The latest set he’d received just an hour ago after basketball practice from his “teammates” who had repeatedly made it clear that they didn’t want him on the team. He didn’t want to be on the team either, but his mother insisted upon him joining the basketball team at his middle school. He pulled down his sleeve to cover up the bruise on his arm and pulled his hood over his face to cover a bruise on his forehead that he’d gotten after having his face slammed into one of the lockers in the changing room. These attempts to cover the bruises would be good enough until he got back home. After all, it was already dark outside by the time he’d left practice.
He let out a sigh. He’d need to steal some of his mother’s makeup again to cover up the bruises once he returned home. He’d done it many times before and every time his mother had been too absent-minded, drunk, or preoccupied to notice someone else had been using her makeup.
After his usual walk home through the cold suburbs on a winter night, Valentino reached his mother’s house. He could hear shouting coming from inside. It was nothing unusual. His mother was having another fight with her boyfriend – one of her boyfriends – over something or other. He briefly looked around to see if anyone else was watching before grabbing the hidden key from behind the drainpipe where he’d taped it. Originally it had been hidden under the door mat, but Valentino had thought that was too obvious, especially in this neighborhood.
After entering the house, Valentino took off his boots and opened his mouth to tell his mother that he’d returned home, but before the words could leave his mouth, a bloodcurdling scream rang out from the direction of the kitchen. Valentino felt his blood run cold and the words “I’m home” died in his throat. The screaming continued, crying out in pain, pleading for help, pleading for someone to “stop.” The young boy felt as if something dark and cold had entered the house behind him, growing closer and closer with every cry.
After a few seconds that seemed to stretch on for an eternity, the boy’s fear went from paralyzing him to lighting a fire underneath him and he rushed into the closet near the front door, trying to flee from the screams and the unknown avatar of dread creeping up behind him. The screams and cries continued while the boy bit down hard on his hand to stifle his own crying.
After what felt like hours, but could only have been a minute or two, the screams stopped. Valentino felt a warm fluid trickle into his mouth as he bit down harder to try and stop himself from trembling or crying out.
A long, dark shadow passed in front of the closet and the boy felt his heart leap out of his chest. He recognized the figure through the crack of the closet door. It was his mother’s boyfriend. Valentino’s eyes quickly glanced over to his boots near the front door and he felt his heart begin to pound even harder. It seemed as if it would jump out of his throat. The second the man saw those boots he would know Valentino was here and the boy figured that whatever the man had done to his mother, he would also do to him.
However, the man never noticed the boots or if he did, he failed to realize what they implied. Looking at it objectively, it was unsurprising. The man was just as panicked as Valentino, though for completely different reasons. His mind was focused on more serious problems than a pair of children’s boots. He quickly glanced back in the direction of the kitchen before pulling his hood up to cover his face and rushed out the door.
Valentino’s heart didn’t stop pounding even after the door had closed. He stood there, terrified and frozen. What if the man came back? It wasn’t clear how long he’d stood there for, but eventually his legs began to cramp, and a new fear entered his mind. What had happened to his mother?
It was obvious.
But Valentino’s mind refused the obvious even as dread of reality began to close in on him. He staggered out of the closet, rubbing his sore legs and made his way towards the kitchen. When he entered, he was met with a sight that would be seared into his mind for years to come.
It barely resembled a person anymore. The mass of meat was covered in a sticky red liquid and the whole room smelled awful. As the boy’s footsteps reached the edge of the pool of blood, he felt the tip of his socks brush up against something. He looked down and saw a severed finger, covered in blood. Long links of something that looked vaguely like sausages were hanging out from the thing in the middle of the pool of blood. He was only able to tell what had once been the thing’s face from where it was in relation to the broken limbs that protruded from the center of thing. It looked more like a bowl made of meat than anything even vaguely resembling a face.
…No. It was obvious what that thing was, even if the boy’s mind wasn’t able to process that fact in the moment.
…
Valentino woke up in a cold sweat and knocked something off his bedside table. He quickly looked around and found he was safe in his room. He let out a deep breath and recollected himself. He was fourteen now, but that sight had been haunting him almost every night. Each time felt just as vivid as that cold winter night four years ago. He looked around the room from behind the curtains of his four-poster bed once more to reassure himself that it was just a distant memory. There was no barking of a neighbor’s dog, no screams, just the steady ticking of the old Edwardian grandfather clock.
A gentle sunlight filtered through the red damask curtains covering the windows. The lower portion of the walls were covered in a fading, but elaborate wallpaper colored with patterns of red, gold, and blue. At the top of the wall was a series of renaissance frescos that wound their way around the room.
In the corner opposite the grandfather clock, there was a fireplace that looked like it hadn’t been used in years and in front of it there was an upholstered armchair that was at least two hundred years old. Next to it lie a pile of books on widely varied topics from nineteenth century novels, books of chemistry, and forensic science, to Pythagorean mysticism. A similar variety of books lined the well-organized shelves that lined one wall which contrasted with the vaguely ordered chaos of the rest of the room.
The strong scent of herbs filled the air and the floor in the center of the room was cluttered with glass bottles and strange implements that looked to be for measuring and crushing up ingredients along with a handful of books – mostly in Latin based on the titles on their spines.
Against the wall opposite the bed there was a wardrobe that was even older than the chair by the fireplace. However, when looking at that wall, one’s gaze wasn’t initially drawn to the beautiful hand-carved oak wardrobe – no it was first drawn to the much more modern office desk and swivel chair that contrasted with the rest of the furniture.
Valentino nodded to himself. Yeah, this was as far removed as possible from that dreary American suburban home as one could be. He looked down at the foot of his bedside cabinet to see what he’d knocked over. It was an English translation of Plutarch’s Parallel Lives. He had stayed up last night reading Plutarch’s biographies of the Gracchi Brothers.
Valentino rubbed his face with his palms to wake himself up and picked up the book. As he set it down on the desk, he grabbed a bookmark from the bedside cabinet and slid it into the book before closing it and making his way over to the wardrobe. As he crossed the floor, he took care not to step on the variety of strange instruments lying on the floor in the center of the room. For the most part they resembled what one would expect from a chemistry set, but there were a few bizarre looking tools that seemed out of place. Usually, these instruments, the small glass bottles filled with liquids of various colors, and crushed up plants lying near them were kept on a shelf opposite the wall with most of the bookshelves, however Valentino had spent a few hours yesterday evening trying to replicate a tincture he’d found in a book written by Paracelsus.
After all, Valentino was a magus – a practitioner in making the impossible possible, a wonder worker.
Of course, such a thing hadn’t always been the case. When Valentino’s mother had been murdered by her boyfriend four years ago, Valentino had been as normal as any other child in the neighborhood. However, not long after his mother’s death, he was adopted by an Italian aristocrat who lived in a Renaissance villa in Rome. His name was Adalberto Claudio Bellincioni and to the ten-year old Valentino, such a name seemed rather impressive, yet perplexing. Why would such a person adopt an orphan from some poor suburb in America?
Naturally, many other questions about his new family came into Valentino’s head and many things happened after he arrived, but in the end, he had become his adoptive father’s apprentice; he too was a magus. As a matter of fact, it had turned out that the Bellincioni family were not just a family of medieval Roman nobility, but also an ancient lineage of magi who claimed to trace their lineage back to the oldest days of the Eternal City.
Valentino replaced the book on the shelf and cleaned up his alchemy equipment before changing into a light blue cotton dress shirt and a pair of dark colored trousers. He moved over to the mirror mounted on the wall near the wardrobe and looked at his reflection. A pair of emerald green eyes stared back at him in annoyance as he noticed the dark bags under them. He quickly ran a comb through his bright blond hair to make it at least somewhat presentable, but made sure it wasn’t too well kept.
He continued staring into the mirror. Something was missing.
“Ah, right.” He retrieved his glasses from his bedside cabinet and placed them on his face. The glasses had unusually thick square frames and for whatever reason the lenses seemed thicker than they truly were. In Valentino’s opinion, they would have made even the most handsome man in the world look unremarkable.
He took a deep breath and carefully examined his expression, adjusting any crease on the forehead or any twitch of the lips downwards that indicated how unhappy he was after that dream. He took another deep breath and put on a well-practiced smile. Once he stepped out the door of his room, the phantom haunting his dreams would need to be put to the side and disappear – at least until the next time he went to sleep.
Valentino stepped out into the long room adjoining his bedroom. Rooms just like this one rather than hallways served the purpose of connecting the different rooms of the house. It looked like the exact sort of place one would expect a fancy aristocratic party or banquet to take place. One could observe on the polished marble floor the reflection of the elaborately crafted, gold-coated chandelier hanging from the ceiling. On the wall was a grated fireplace with a grand mantle and above it a Renaissance fresco by Peruzzi depicting the forge of the Roman god Vulcan. There were various doors around the room which led to different rooms and parts of the house. Circling the whole room were frescos near the ceiling depicting various subjects, but the most impressive thing in the room was those frescos that made it appear as if the room itself expanded into the frescos themselves. They depicted what looked like an extension of the room with great marble columns extending out to a balcony overlooking Rome as it looked back when the frescos were first painted.
This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.
Valentino had been impressed by these frescos the most even back when he had first arrived. It appeared as if one could walk right into the fresco and between its columns. He could practically feel the wind blowing in from the city through the balcony depicted in the fresco. These had only grown more impressive to him as time had passed. Even after four years of living here he still felt out of place living among such highly esteemed and priceless pieces of art, though he was now able to at least keep up the appearance of being used to it.
Valentino made his way down to the dining room and pressed a small, unobtrusive button located on the wall. Once he had pressed the button, a quiet ringing could be heard. The villa’s bell system was designed to call servants to any room in the home. It had been installed all the way back in the 1890s when the then head of the family, Aurelio, had it installed after he had the villa renovated when he had returned from his studies in Britain.
A mere few moments later, the doors to the dining room opened and a young girl entered. She was the same age as Valentino with sand blonde hair tied up into an unobtrusive bun and cool brown eyes and wore a humble but formal uniform befitting a domestic servant in training. Her name was Adelheid, though she almost always went by Heide. Her father served as the butler to the head of the Bellincioni family at the Palazzo Bellincioni in Trevi. Heide and her younger sister worked under their father as servants in training in the Palazzo Bellincioni, but also frequently came over to work at the Villa Aureliana in Trastevere where Valentino and his adoptive father lived.
“Good morning, Signorino,” Heide said with a polite nod, but without letting a smile cross her lips. “Would you like me to prepare your usual breakfast?”
“Yes, thank you, Heide.”
Despite being the same age as Valentino, Heide never acted in a friendly manner towards him, nor was she at all hostile. If anything, Valentino would say that she put a great deal of effort into ensuring that she always acted in a restrained and purely professional manner. While it could come off as cold, her stoic attitude ensured that she remained an unobtrusive presence. Valentino considered her dedication to her work admirable if anything. This was a radical contrast from her sister, Klothilde, who was three years younger.
Klothilde, despite her somewhat pompous sounding name, was far closer in attitude to what one would expect from a child her age. She preferred to be called Hilde and treated Valentino more as if he were an older brother than the adoptive son of her employer. While she was just as diligent in her work as her older sister, whom she greatly admired, Hilde was more prone to making mistakes and had an overall friendlier demeanor.
The two sisters usually alternated who worked at the villa every weekday aside from Friday, which was normally a busy day at the Palazzo Bellincioni. They usually stayed the night in the servants’ quarters and exchanged shifts early in the morning. The main exception to this was on Saturdays when Heide would normally come over to carry out her duties but would leave sometime in the early afternoon.
When Valentino first arrived, Heide and her sister had been charged with ensuring that Valentino woke up on time so that he would be prepared for his studies in the morning. Rather than going to a conventional school, he was taught by private tutors, including his adoptive father. It was an education regimen far stricter and more intense to what he had been used to from school back in America – and, he suspected, far more intense than what the average child learned in school in Italy as well.
He was instructed in a number of practical fields including mathematics, economics, finance, and the sciences with a special emphasis on chemistry and astronomy. Instruction on etiquette was unsurprisingly also emphasized as a member of a family that prided itself on its aristocratic heritage. Valentino, however, noticed that there was a particular focus on the more classical elements to his education. He was taught history with a particular reliance upon Livy and Tacitus. Needless to say, his studies in that area particularly emphasized the history of Ancient Greece, Rome, and to a lesser extent Italy. It seemed to him that the reason for this was to emphasize continuity between the three. In addition, he was made to learn Latin and Greek as most of the material for his historical studies were to be read in their original languages. As a part of his studies of languages he of course had to learn Italian but was also taught rhetoric with a focus on the example of that great classical orator, Cicero. It was as a part of his rhetorical education that he was also taught about the Ars Memoria – the art of memory. His education also emphasized philosophy, including the study of Plato, Aristotle, Machiaevelli, and the Greek moralist, Plutarch; literature was of course taught to him as well with focus on Homer, Virgil, Dante, Shakespeare, and Italian literature in general, though occasionally there was a French work or two.
Naturally, this was all an overwhelming amount to learn in only four years and even Valentino had to admit he hadn’t mastered any of these fields, despite showing a brilliant mind in his studies. It did however provide him with grounding in these fields which, according to his adoptive father, was the main purpose of his education. However, after a few months of his initial studies in these fields, Valentino had been approached by his adoptive father about the opportunity to study something else – something he was certain no conventional school in any country was teaching – the art of thaumaturgy.
To the average person, what the Bellincioni family described as “thaumaturgy” would appear to be magic. It is the art of “working wonders.” Its practitioners, though they could be called thaumaturges, usually referred to themselves as mages or magi. They include a variety of people and disciplines as varied as the images conjured by the very word “magic.” They are alchemists, astrologers, kabbalists, the practitioners of esoteric arts and mysticism. Theirs is a world of secrets which was to be kept hidden from the world at large under pain of death. For magi, they are the guardians of Mystery – all those bizarre things in this world regarded with a sense of the sacred and unexplainable. In other words, Mystery is the source of all things supernatural in this world.
Mystery is something that grows stronger as time passes and greater the mythos that is built up around it. For instance, a sword said to have been wielded by an ancient king and attributed with mystic powers would certainly possess much greater Mystery than a sword forged by even the greatest swordsmith today. As such, if one were to say try to strike a ghost – another creature of Mystery – with the modern sword, it would simply pass through it. However, if one were to strike the ghost with this ancient sword which has been spoken of in legends passed down for over a millennium, one would likely find that the sword had not only struck the ghost, but seriously injured it. However, while Mysteries will normally grow stronger with age, they could also be weakened or destroyed if they are exposed or desacralized. For example, in the past the human body and its inner workings were much less well known than they are now with modern medical science; because of this, in the past it was not uncommon for magi to be able to create artificial forms of human life. In alchemy, these were known as homunculi. However, with the advancement of scientific knowledge about the human body and the more it became simply a mechanism of flesh and muscle in the eyes of man, the more difficult it became to produce homunculi to the point where today only a handful of magi could hope to produce a homunculus and even then it would certainly be inferior to those made in centuries past. It is for this reason, the diminishment of Mystery in the world, that magi, who had in ages past been prestigious members of royal courts, were now obligated to hide themselves and the very existence of their world.
While normally, a child would feel inclined to brag about having magic powers and show them off to their peers, Valentino was content to keep it a secret. He had grown up in a world without thaumaturgy, the mundane world that magi often called the world of the profane and whose inhabitants, non-magi, they referred to, often derisively, as the profani – an old term that had been used to describe them since the time of the Roman Republic. To Valentino, the world of magi provided him with an escape from everything that had come before and as a result he felt no desire to mix the two worlds. In his case, the study of thaumaturgy had focused on alchemy, numerology, and to a lesser extent divination – though the last of these he found was often unreliable and easy to misinterpret.
As with most of his mundane studies, he had excelled in his thaumaturgical studies much to the astonishment and – surprisingly enough – barely concealed disappointment of his adopted father. After a mere two years of instruction in the art of thaumaturgy, his adopted father, Adalberto, had nothing left to teach Valentino. He was, after all, not the family’s primary heir and so their secrets of thaumaturgy had not been passed down to Adalberto. To Valentino it had seemed that Adalberto had adopted him in hopes of starting his own mage lineage. As far as that goal was concerned, he had a remarkable stroke of luck with an apprentice as skilled as Valentino, but at the same time, seeing a mere child master in two years what had taken Adalberto a lifetime to learn was understandably disheartening.
As such, while Valentino had continued his studies in thaumaturgy, they were mostly self-directed – an incredibly dangerous endeavor, but he had little choice if he wished to take his studies in the art any further. His mundane studies continued with their usual rigor, but over the past few months, they had become less frequent and as a result of this and his self-study, Valentino’s schedule became more flexible. It was no longer necessary for him to be woken up by either of the maids at a set time and thanks to his late-night studies in the art, it would have been impractical for him to wake up as early as he was previously expected to.
While Heide was preparing breakfast in the kitchen, Valentino attempted to collect his thoughts and formulate a plan for the day. It was a Saturday, so he didn’t have any lessons. However, he had been so focused on his research last night that he failed to consider how he would spend today. He thought to himself that perhaps he should just lock himself up in his room and spend the day immersed in his research, though his heart wasn’t really in it. He’d begun to feel like he was hitting a wall in his thaumaturgical studies as of late and it was starting to become a source of frustration.
As he occupied himself with these thoughts, he heard the sound of a tea cart being pushed into the room and turned to see that Heide had returned. She politely set out Valentino’s usual breakfast, a couple of slices of fresh bread and a jar of marmalade to spread on it. She then poured him a cup of tea from the blue and white porcelain teapot that was sitting on the cart. The fragrant scent of tea leaves filled the room as she set the cup down in front of Valentino. When Valentino had first arrived in Italy, he had done his best to try to get into the coffee culture of his new home but could never get accustomed to the taste of it. He found that he much preferred tea. This particular tea he was being served was a blend of black tea purchased from a shop in Paris on the Rue du Bourg-Tibourg. Despite how much he enjoyed it, he used to feel uncomfortable drinking such expensive tea until he looked up the brand of coffee beans his adopted father used online and discovered how much they cost.
Lastly on the tea cart was a morning newspaper. In this day and age, Valentino, like any other boy his age, found it extremely outdated, and frankly wasteful, to buy a physical newspaper when one could just as easily access the same news online for free. However, Adalberto had made him adopt this habit not long after he arrived. He had said that it was essential to stay abreast of what is going on in the world, but that relying too much on a smartphone would cause Valentino to become easily distracted and easily influenced.
Heide laid out the paper for him on the table and he thanked her for her services. As he glanced over the contents of the newspaper, he found an article that caught his eye. “A Specter is Haunting Rome, the Specter of a Murderer.” It was an article about another possible serial killing that had taken place in Rome. It was the most bizarre series of “murders” anyone could recall in recent memory. Some doubted whether they were even really murders. The article was reporting on a third such incident and it shared these unusual elements with the first two deaths: the victim had been killed with an object in their own house whether through bludgeoning or stabbing, the object did not have any fingerprints on them aside from that of the owner, the homes of the victims had not been broken into, and, most curiously, the murder weapon had been found several feet away from the victims – a fact that among certain others seemed to rule out the possibility of suicide. Furthermore, all the victims had been women or children. Valentino felt himself wretch at that fact as he recalled that fact.
He had heard of the previous two incidents, but it was possible they were mere coincidence. It was only with this third that it began to appear as if there was a truly bizarre series of murders going on and given the unusual character of the killings, Valentino in the back of his mind began to suspect that the killer, like him, might be a magus.
