Diavola

The next day, Ana receives a stern warning from building management about the strange noises that come from her apartment. Bored and lonely, she phones her mother, who is very cold to her. Her mother now knows about Anna’s termination of pregnancy (either Benny or Nicole has told her) and is also siding with Nicole’s interpretation that Anna purposefully frightened the girls during the vacation.

Anna goes to sit and sketch in the park and draws two portraits of Caterina: One depicts her as a beautiful woman, and the other shows her grotesque appearance as a ghost. A passerby admires the former and purchases the drawing from Anna.

Anna is increasingly overwhelmed and exhausted. She’s chastised at work for her strange appearance and behavior and is excluded by coworkers with whom she used to socialize. Her apartment neighbors are even more exasperated by the strange noises in her apartment. Meanwhile, Caterina has opened the booking page for the Villa Taccola. Seeing this, Anna vomits what looks like blood; she passes out and dreams of the villa, where she feels at peace.

Anna attends an important client meeting to pitch a new advertising campaign. Midway through, she displays a mocking, sexually explicit image to the entire office. Anna is immediately fired, though the client—a young man who just inherited his father’s business—is impressed by her talent and asks her both if she’s shown her work in any galleries and if she’d be interested in a date. Anna gently turns him down. On the train home, she runs into her ex-boyfriend, Josh, and impulsively invites him back to her apartment.

At her apartment, Anna and Josh have sex; it is apparent that he is still angry with her for having the abortion and blames her for the end of their relationship. Before he leaves, she gives him the key from the villa. Josh is confused, but she tells him that if he doesn’t want it, he should simply throw it in the trash. Josh leaves the apartment, and moments later, Anna hears sounds of an accident outside. She learns that Josh has been hit by a car and died. The key inexplicably appears back on her bed, and she feels the presence of the ghost again.

In the morning, Anna wakes to find broken bottles and other detritus scattered around her apartment; when she checks her laptop, she finds that she has partially filled out the form to book the villa. She learns that she is about to be evicted from her apartment and that she has forgotten several weeks during which, according to Duolingo, she has been studying Italian.

She calls Benny and tells him that the ghost has followed her home from Italy. He agrees that there was a ghostly presence in the villa, but he refuses to advocate for Anna with the rest of their family. He explains that he thinks Anna is the principal source of chaos and unhappiness in his life and the lives of the rest of the family. He feels better when they don’t have contact. Anna angrily ends the conversation but is left devastated. That night, she has a dream in which she and Caterina have sex, and she gives over control to the ghost.

Anna makes arrangements to travel back to Villa Taccola. When she arrives, she explains to the caretaker that she has returned with the key, but he refuses to take it. She tells him that she is going to arrange matters so that the townspeople will no longer need to “feed” the house.

Alone at the villa, Anna can sense many other ghosts—the family that Caterina killed, as well as the villa’s later residents. At first, it seems like Anna will die by suicide, but she then begins performing rituals for banishing ghosts based on the research she has done. She addresses Caterina directly, explaining that she no longer has anything to lose and that she isn’t afraid of the ghost anymore. She goes on to mock Caterina for her behavior—believing that her lover would leave his wife and children for her, seducing the man’s teenage son, etc. Most importantly, Caterina misjudged Anna: She believed Anna was isolated and vulnerable, but Anna is proud to be the “black sheep” of her family. Moreover, she has been paying attention to the magic Caterina revealed to Anna in her dreams while doing research of her own; Caterina, in her self-absorption, never noticed.

Anna successfully blocks Caterina from feeding on her victims’ energy. As she tells the other ghosts that they are free, she glimpses Christopher, now a ghost, and has a vision of him being brutally killed by her family in a drunken and chaotic scene. She also has a vision of her and Benny forging a goodbye note to explain Christopher’s disappearance. Anna and Caterina begin struggling as Caterina attacks her and drags her to the tower. However, with the help of Christopher and the other ghosts, Anna traps Caterina in the tower room and locks her in.

The villa abruptly feels empty and calm. Anna leaves and deposits the key in the woods outside. After a few minutes, the key reappears in her pocket. Anna accepts this since the key no longer seems to carry a malevolent presence.

The narrative resumes several years later. Anna has become a famous artist, working under the pseudonym the Tuscan Lady; she sends her work to a gallery owned by the client she met on the day she was fired. She lives simply in Italy and enjoys her solitude. She is estranged from her family but has recently heard from Waverley, who is now in her early twenties. Waverley alluded to how “the others had all unraveled, it seems, one by one” (291). Anna sometimes feels drawn to return to the villa and open the tower door, but she controls this impulse. She feels a newfound freedom and contentment in her life.