Flowers over the Inferno

Ilaria Tuti

Chapters (84)

First published in Italian under the title Fiori sopra l’inferno.

First published in English in the United Kingdom by
The Orion Publishing Group, Ltd, 2019.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either
are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events,
or locales is entirely coincidental.

Published by

Soho Press, Inc.

853 Broadway

New York, NY 10003

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Tuti, Ilaria, author. | Oklap, Ekin, translator.

Flowers over the inferno / Ilaria Tuti ; translated from the Italian

by Ekin Oklap.

Other titles: Fiori sopra l’inferno.

ISBN 978-1-64129-068-5

eISBN 978-1-64129-069-2

I. Title

PQ4920.U86 F5613 2019 853’.92—dc23 2018046491

Interior design by Janine Agro, Soho Press, Inc.

Printed in the United States of America

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

AUSTRIA, 1978

There was a legend that haunted that place, the kind that clings like a persistent odor. It was rumored that in late autumn every year—before the rain turned to snow—the mountain lake would begin to exhale sinister murmurs.

They came from the water like steam and rose over the banks with the morning mist when the surface of the lake reflected the sky, heaven mirrored in hell. That was when the hissing began, a sound like a protracted howl that enveloped the late nineteenth-century building on the eastern shore of the lake.

The School. That’s what they called it, down in the village, though the purpose and the description of the building had shifted through the years, from imperial hunting lodge, to Nazi command center, to a sanatorium for consumptive children.

Now there was only silence along its corridors, only peeling walls, crumbling plaster, and the echoes of solitary footsteps—and in November, the howling that unfurled through the fog, rising to the top floor windows and onto the pitched roof glistening with frost.

But legends were for children, the elderly and nostalgic, and for the faint of heart. This much, Agnes Braun knew. The School had been her home for long enough that she wouldn’t let something like nocturnal whispers get to her. She had memorized the creak of each floorboard and every rusty pipe winding through the entrails of those walls—even though most of the building’s floors were closed off now, and many rooms boarded shut. Ever since the School had been converted into an orphanage, public funding had dwindled and no private benefactor had come forward with a donation.