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Doctor Orfeo and Doctor Ione met in the cemetery of their lives. They met in the hidden places of power that were long forgotten to most. They were never seen together in the daylight, meeting solely at night and during fleeting moments when they would become real to one another, otherwise separated by the fabric of reality itself. Sometimes Doctor Orfeo would experiment with ways of astral projection, and sometimes Doctor Ione would create effigies for Doctor Orfeo to inhabit; none of their methods yielded any significant manifestations aside from meetings with stray sea spirits that wandered a long way from the ancient Nuragic civilization of an offshoot dimension. So it was that all they had together were infrequent, fractured moments that they strung together where they would hand each other epistolary tablets and walk together, talking about what they found to be important. Somehow they always found each other, despite Doctor Orfeo’s wandering business of performing miracles all along the western coast of the country.

In Santa Ninfa, so ahead of schedule, the two began to meet in a secluded park situation on a low point near the harbor, the entirety of that dreadful city spread in drab majesty behind them both, its lights reflected in the water, scintillant like a treasure trove that was dropped in the deep recesses of the night. Reaching out for Doctor Ione’s hand on the first night that he arrived, Doctor Orfeo was suddenly overwhelmed by a deep sadness that he could not bear to tell her about. He could only look into her eyes and see the hermetic perversions that would churn the rotation of the earth back to daytime, sunlight tearing the covers off to reveal the rotten sights that bedeviled the dust caked streets, the burdened populace, the scraps of newspaper and Italian banana peels that blew about in the volcano winds.

During the day it was back to work for both of them: Doctor Orfeo would depart his rented room in a three-storey white brick and terra cotta building, and Doctor Ione would emerge from a dalmatian colored conch shell planted in the sea floor. They lived parallel lives, one doctor on land, and the other in another world, under the sea. Without one, the other’s miracles -- such as the cure for the child with a thumb that turned wooden, or the man whose mouth became a conduit to a grocery store for sea apes -- would utterly vanish.

“This is really some stupid business we’ve gotten ourselves into,” Doctor Ione said to Doctor Orfeo in the last night of May, “wouldn’t it have been easier to practice medicine this whole time, like we thought we were going to do?”

Biting his lip about it, Doctor Orfeo looked away from the glowing halo of smoke from the volcano in the distance, and turned to Doctor Ione. “I always think about that. Maybe once we’re done here, we can move on from this work. The seal is broken, but we can always try to escape the floodwaters.” There was doubt in his mind in that moment, and he knew she could sense it. They went on with their evening until one in the morning, when both parties flickered out of existence for a moment, taking the deserted harbor park with them, the place becoming nothing more than a wide gravel path between buildings. Doctor Orfeo reappeared in his room, and Doctor Ione reappeared in hers.

The following morning, Doctor Orfeo departed early as he always did, and set about his way through the city, taking appointments. His last one that day ended with a case involving the city’s star artichoke seller, who was stricken by bouts of depression because she had shouldered a grave burden for years: a bulb of ghost garlic belonging to her aunt had haunted her for years, floating alongside her at all hours, dragging her down like a proverbial carbuncle glued to her butt. The garlic didn’t say very much, though it could have, and that would have been preferable to the artichoke seller, who went by Alicia Cartago on all official paperwork, and Sandra among friends. After convincing the garlic that it was better off finding a new source of life energy, Doctor Orfeo carried it in a glass fishbowl back to his room in the evening. After ascending the stairs he found a note pinned to his door:

Doctor Orfeo, by the humble request of Don Benedetto, you’re invited to Palazzo Serpentine tonight at eight. The note had the address for the Palazzo Serpentine along the bottom; it was in a neighborhood high above the city itself, in a house that could see eye to eye with the volcano in the distance.

Doctor Orfeo knew of that house. The note left Doctor Orfeo with a sense of trepidation. There were more than ancient water sprites living on that hill. There were things beyond the brother and sister spirits and shades he knew. He only opened the door to his apartment after his new garlic ward began to pester him with questions about whether he had freshly ironed linens inside, and whether he would send it back to the astral realm today, tomorrow, or the next day.

“Not yet,” the Doctor said without looking down at the garlic, “we may have to work on other things first.”

by Anthony Giordano