Excerpt from The Curse of Pietro Houdini by Derek B. Miller, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

THE WHITE BEAST AND ITS walls came into view through the trees like a mirage—ancient and foreboding—and then disappeared.

"The foundations were raised in 529 AD," Pietro said, sensing but overintellectualizing my curiosity. "That was the same year the Christian emperor Justinian closed Plato's Academy in Athens by defunding it, thereby ensuring the downfall of what they considered pagan philosophy. Symbolically, my young Massimo, the intellectual life of the West shifted from the academy to the cloisters. To right there. It wouldn't return to the academy until the pagans found their voices again in the Renaissance, all without my help! Up there," he added, "is where St. Benedict wrote his Rule and monastic life began. Every monk you've ever seen got his ideas about how to live from an old document written right up there. Its significance to the Christian mind can't be overstated. We are going to call it home for a little while. It is an island in a rising sea of despair. You may think you've seen hard times, but harder still are coming. Math does not lie."

I was intimidated and awed when I arrived at the top. From the bottom the abbey had looked like a toy, a dollhouse. But when I was standing beside it the walls were as heavy and thick as those of a castle. The windows were small and there was only one way inside, through an archway with the word "PAX" inscribed at the top.

PEACE.

It looked more like a threat or a command than a prayer.

Peace… or else.

My father—perhaps as a joke, because fathers lie to their children for humor—had led me to believe that voices live inside rock. When I was little, maybe six, he took me to the Pantheon in Rome. Inside was the domed roof with the hole in the top where the rain had been pouring in since 128 AD (long before Montecassino was built). When you stand beneath that dome, toward the sides, you can hear whispers. They come from all over the room, but when I was a child I did not believe they came from the other people. I was certain—and my father confirmed it—that the words came from the rocks, and they spoke in Latin and Greek and Hebrew and other ancient and exciting languages because it was not the rocks speaking but instead the remembered words spoken in there by the dead. Rocks did not speak, but instead retained the sounds, the very vibrations, of every word spoken in their presence. Somehow, when forces aligned, those words were released and if you listened carefully you could hear the conversations of the dead. "Not ghosts," my father said. "The past. Which is far more interesting."

To me, Montecassino was made of the same rock. Standing there, however, I sensed more: Unlike the Pantheon, which was a dead place and a museum and a tourist attraction, this monastery was no relic, no ruin. It was alive. Words were being spoken in those languages even now, and so many more. Inside the rock were the stories of fifteen hundred years; stories that were not trapped in the cloisters but had already broken free long ago to change the world. Outside the entrance I could feel the pulse of the world thumping beneath the floors and I could already hear the whisperings of the crypts.

In Cassino, I had had no idea any of this was up here: a fortress in the clouds. For someone who wanted to hide as I did, there was perhaps no better place.

When we entered the compound through the archway, the scorching sun reflected off the sandstone, making the air shimmer and become heavy. Through the archways to my left I saw the brown and green of the valley dotted by the small villages below. Around me there were monks, like back in Rome.

"I'm thirsty," I said to Pietro, hiding the rest of my concerns.

"I know."

"I need to pee."

"We will get water in and out of you soon."

"I have to go now," I said.

"We will now meet the abbot," he said with my emphasis. "He is very old. Old enough to have shrunk. There will be an exchange of papers and blessings. Your relief will be that much greater when all is done." He turned to me, looking serious. "Again: be quiet and, no matter what I say, you contradict nothing or there will be no food, water, or toilet for you."

Excerpted from The Curse of Pietro Houdini by Derek B. Miller. Copyright © 2024 by Derek B. Miller. Excerpted by permission of Avid Reader Press. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.