Of Love and Evil by Anne Rice

texts from Hebrew into Latin for Signore Antonio, who has a library five times the size of this which means everything to him. Niccolò and I were drinking companions as well as fellow students, and we went on, all of us, to Padua together and then finally home to Rome, where Signore Antonio set me up in this house to prepare it for Niccolò. It’s for Niccolò and his bride, this house, but then the ghost appeared the very first night I knelt down and said my prayers here.”
    There came another loud crash from above and the distinctsound of someone walking, though it seemed to me, in a house like this, one could not have heard the sound of an ordinary person walking.
    The servant was still with us, crouched by the door, holding his candle. His head was bald and pink in the light with only a few wisps of dark hair, and he stared uneasily at the pair of us.
    “Go on, Pico, get out of here,” said Vitale. “Run to Signore Antonio and tell him I’m coming directly.” Gratefully the man ran out. Vitale looked at me. “I’d offer you food and drink, but there’s nothing here. The servants have run away. Everyone but Pico has run away. Pico would die for me. Perhaps he thinks that’s what’s about to happen.”
    “The ghost,” I reminded him. “You said that he came the night you prayed. This meant something to you.”
    He fixed me seriously for a moment. “You know, I feel I’ve known you all my life,” he said. “I feel I can tell you my most spiritual secrets.”
    “You can,” I said. “But if we should see Niccolò soon, you’ll have to speak quickly.”
    He sat still gazing at me, and his dark eyes had a low fire in them that I found rather fascinating. His face was filled with animation, as if he couldn’t disguise any emotion, even if he wanted to, and he seemed at any moment about to burst into some wild exclamation but instead he grew quiet and began to talk in a low running voice.
    “The ghost was always here, that’s my fear. He was here and he will be here after we’re forced out. The house has been shut up for twenty years. Signore Antonio told me that long ago he had let it to one of his earlier Hebrew scholars. He will say nothing else about the man except that he once lived here. Now, he wants the house for Niccolò and Niccolò’s bride, and I’m to stay on, to be Niccolò’s secretary, and physician whenneeded, and possibly the tutor to his sons when they’re born. It was all such a happy scheme, this.”
    “And Niccolò was not ill yet.”
    “Oh, no, far from it. Niccolò was fine. Niccolò was looking forward to his wedding to Leticia. Niccolò and Lodovico his brother were making all kinds of plans. No, nothing bad had happened to Niccolò.”
    “And then you prayed that first night and the ghost began to trouble you.”
    “Yes. You see, I found the room upstairs which had been the synagogue. I found the Ark and in it the old scrolls of the Torah. These had belonged to that scholar whom long ago Antonio had let live here. I knelt down and I prayed, and I fear I prayed for things I had no right to pray for.”
    “Tell me.”
    “I prayed for fame,” he said in a small voice. “I prayed for riches. I prayed for recognition. I prayed that, somehow, I’d become a great physician in Rome, and that I would be an outstanding scholar for Signore Antonio, perhaps translating texts for him that no one had yet discovered or made available.”
    “That sounds like a very human prayer to me,” I said, “and given your gifts, it sounds quite understandable.”
    He looked at me so gratefully that it was heartbreaking. “You see, I have many gifts,” he said humbly. “I have a gift for writing and reading that could keep me busy all my days. But then I have a gift as a physician as well, an ability to touch a man’s hand and know what is wrong with him.”
    “Was it wrong then to pray that these gifts would flower?”
    He smiled and shook his head. “You may have come to play the