Best New Horror #26

Ron Weighell THE FOUR STRENGTHS OF SHADOW

THE STORM, WHICH had been prowling the lagoon all morning, fell with a roar upon Venice just as Summers alighted at the fondamenta of Ca’ Mortensa. As he raced the rain to the marble encrusted water gate, he saw Signor Bramanti waiting for him, his bulk dwarfed by winged lions of corroded bronze that flanked the entrance. A cordial shaking of hands, a gesture of mock despair to the heavens, and Bramanti led the way into the Andron.

Skirting an ancient well head, they climbed a winding marble stair into the Portego, an echoing space that ran the depth of the building. It was floored with terrazzo, its walls decorated with once exquisite architectural features in stucco, now crumbling into picturesque ruin. The space struck cold, but not, Summers noted with relief, particularly damp.

Having been told that Ca’ Mortensa was unoccupied, he was surprised when a door opened and a woman every bit as round as Bramanti, but resplendent in a flowing gown, and what looked like a fright wig of bright red hair, began to shout in a dialect too thick for Summers to follow. Two pairs of short, fat arms waved madly in the air as Bramanti shouted back. At length the woman withdrew with a parting curse. Bramanti shook his head.

“I must apologise, Signor Sommer, this woman, she was the—compagno—of the Contessa who was the last occupant. This woman, she should go, she has no right to be here, but here the Law! Festina Lente—make haste slowly, as they say. She is convinced we have come to steal the Contessa’s things.” He grimaced, and gave a shivering shrug, as if the woman’s belief was a contamination of which he must rid himself.

Summers nodded. He was all too familiar with the myth of that last descendant of a noble line, withdrawn into a single room of the palazzetto, holding court among the remnants of her art collection in a huge gondola bed, her growing bulk swathed in Fortuny fabrics, tangled mane covering her pillows. Her companion had evidently adopted the same uniform, down to the untended hair.

“Well you can inform her that I am here only to research the life of Sigismondo Mortensa. The Contessa, or any other past occupant of the house, is of no interest to me. By the way, no one recognised the name of this place when I gave it to the taxi men. I got here by describing the location, but they kept calling it something else.”

“Ca’ Maledetto—accursed, damned.” Bramanti flushed and examined the floor. “It is a local name—no doubt because the fortunes of the Mortensa family have fallen so low.” He led the way into a shuttered space haunted by melancholy, contemplative ghosts of marble and bronze. The walls were decorated with panels cut from ancient Roman sarcophagi, reinforcing the sepulchral atmosphere.

Bramanti seemed to read Summer’s thoughts. “I will of course have the rooms aired and a heater brought for you. No fires, I am afraid. We must be strict about such things. And I must ask you please to be most careful about turning it off before you leave each day.” A distressing thought seemed to strike him. “You were of course informed that it is not possible to sleep here?”

“Oh please don’t worry about that, I have lodgings arranged, I am well aware how privileged I am to get access at all!”

This seemed to please Bramanti. He nodded and allowed himself a tight smile. “Now, I think you will want to see the library!”

The room was very dark. Bramanti began to throw open shutters, revealing a glorious, if rain-lashed, view of the Church of San Bartolomeo. Summers realised that his hero, Sigismondo Mortensa, must have stood where he was now standing, looking proudly every day upon the Baroque structure that was the architect’s greatest work.

The library was even more beautiful than he had imagined. The ceiling and walls were covered with frescoes faded to the colour of autumn fruits, except where immense bookcases in Palladian architectural form climbed, by Corinthian columns and wrought-iron walkways, to the painted heavens, their shelves a treasure-trove of vellum and calf.

The most remarkable object in the room was a clock over ten feet high, a kind of miniature Torre dell Orologio, with a clock face depicting Saturn devouring his children and a group of automata on top.

“Do you think it would be possible to get this going?” Summers asked.

“I could try to locate the key,” Bramanti replied doubtfully. “If I can, I will have it left here for you.”

When Bramanti was gone, Summers pulled off a few covers, releasing clouds of dust into the slanting shafts of light that fell through the tall Serlian window. A gigantic desk, big enough for six people, was revealed, along with some very beautiful and surprisingly comfortable chairs and couches. With some form of heating he would be quite at home.

This was one of his favourite moments, before the hard work began, when he could give himself up to the pleasures of his surroundings. This was doubly true in Venice. He was as susceptible as anyone to what Henry James had called “the sweet bribery of association and recollection”. Crossing to the window, he took in the mellow golden splendour of the church façade, a late Baroque extravaganza of columns, scrolls and statues, with rain pouring in cascades from every slanting surface. Behind the glassy sheets of water, the shadows gathered under the entablatures and arches which seemed cavernous, looming spaces in which the carved figures of stone seemed to move uneasily.

“Terribilità,” Summers intoned to himself Mortensa’s own favourite word for the architectural effect he sought to create. “Terribilità in spades!”

Turning to the nearest bookshelf, he took down a volume at random. The complete works of Angelo Ambrogini Poliziano, tutor to the son of Lorenzo de Medici, the first edition in its original binding! Again a book at random; a treasure from the Press of Aldus Manutius, a Greek bible of 1518. More, a copy of the Aldine Editio Princeps of Aristotle’s works; and a 1495–96 Idylls of Theocritus. Many bore the mark of the Florence Academy.

A beam of sunlight broke through the storm clouds and penetrated the chamber, turning the dancing motes of dust to gold. Summers smiled contentedly to himself.

“Ca’ Maledetto! Accursed, damned! If so, then let me be accursed and damned forever!”

In the days that followed, Summers settled into a pleasing routine. A bracing walk from his lodgings to Via Serpente, where he entered the palazzetto by the much less salubrious landward entrance. Bramanti had been as good as his word, for he found an adequate if unsafe looking heater in the library. Two large keys, joined with string, lay on the desk; one quite plain, the other beautifully ornate, with a gorgon head embossed upon it. Summers assumed that the more ornate one would wind the clock, but it was the plain one that worked. The hours struck with a mellow sound, like distantly heard church bells, and the automata moved.

On examination, Summers concluded that the scene was the flaying of Marsyas. On the left-hand side stood Apollo playing his lyre; on the right the L’arrotino or knife-sharpener crouched to whet his blade. Between them Marsyas hung by his wrists in preparation for his bloody punishment. At every hour Apollo plucked his lyre, the crouching figure sharpened his little knife, and Marsyas opened his mouth in a silent scream, turning his head stiffly from side to side. The clock was charming, and the sound pleasant, but Summers was aware at every chiming that a gathered silence of many years was being disturbed.

Every morning he researched among the Mortensa books and papers, had lunch at a local trattoria recommended by Bramanti, wandered back through the convolutions of Via Serpente, spent the early afternoon browsing over some interesting volume, then worked again until early evening. On Sunday he went to Mass in a local church, but not Mortensa’s, a visit to which he was saving as a special treat.

Rain swept in waves over the roofs and cupolas of Venice, but lost in his work, Summers hardly noticed. On days of particularly foul weather he took to bringing his lunch with him and not leaving the palazzetto at all.

The library was a delight. Once he approached a door alongside the great clock and only realised as he reached out to open it that it was a staggering piece of trompe l’œil. The bibliophilic joys, too, were unending. One afternoon he wasted hours, lost in a 1499 Hypnerotomachia Poliphili, the vellum binding and heavy, hand-made paper of which were just as ravishingly sensuous as the adventures conveyed by the text and illustrations. With a pang of envy, he came upon a long shelf of books on anatomy by the likes of Guido Guidi, Realdo Columbo and Gabrielle Fallopio, though surprisingly (and for Summers disappointingly) not a sign of an Andreas Vesalius De humani corporis fabrica, the one book on the subject he would have bet on finding.

Perhaps the explanation for this last mystery lay in an annotation in one of the other works:

Had that rumour offended the devout Mortensa’s Christian spirit so much that he would not allow a copy in his library?

Every day something memorable occurred. Once he took down a set of matching “volumes” with no labels and found they were false books full of mounted cameos and intaglios, each set enriched at the centre with a gold Tiberius. Most exciting of all, when he examined the section of the shelves devoted to architecture, he found that the copies of Vitruvius, Alberti, Palladio and the anonymous Sepulchres of Etruria, were all annotated by Mortensa himself!

At least they were in part so annotated. Summers found two similar but distinguishable hands, and realised with a flutter of excitement, that here before him was the first record of a relationship mentioned by Vasari.

For surely the second hand must belong to Antonio Borsini, Mortensa’s protégé, who had been groomed to take over the master’s mantle, and had so spectacularly betrayed him by disappearing with their work on San Bartolomeo scarcely begun, escaping just before anonymous denunciation for heretical and blasphemous activities.

On first reading Vasari’s account, Summers had been humbled by Mortensa’s Christian forbearance. Such a blow might have justified a bitter denunciation from the great architect, but this was a man who habitually dressed in skull-cap and cassock, and donated many holy relics to the churches he built. All that he had allowed himself was a gentle statement of disappointment and a heartfelt offer of forgiveness and support, if only the young man would return.

The two hands were similar, but Summers thought he could discern which was which by the tone of the annotations. This surely was Mortensa, writing of The Knowledge of perfect proportions, the harmony which produces beauty, and beside an exquisite little sketch of the human form within a church ground plan, the words The interior of the body is a divine secret. The character of Borsini, on the other hand, was readily identified in such passages as Some divide demons into nine degrees, standing contrary to the nine orders of angels. The first of these are called false gods, who would be worshipped as gods and would demand sacrifices and Adorations. Another example, on sculptural decoration, recorded, The rams heads refer to the power of destruction as the ram is the acknowledged symbol of Pluto, Lord of the Dead. And perhaps worst of all: Even as our brother in the divine Counsels of Night, Morto da Feltre, descended into the subterranean fastnesses of Rome’s ruins, there to draw the grotesques, and from such inspiration invented sgraffito, whereby a design in white is only delineated by the presence of its black ground, so do we seek the ancient wisdom that we may build in marble that which depends, for its true meaning, upon the Four Strengths of Shadow.

Perhaps Mortensa had been too kindly and naïve to recognise the dangerous drift of such comments.

Summers came upon another troubling example of Borsini’s influence on the Mortensa Library during these first days, a huge canvas-bound folio among the architectural volumes. As he turned the pages he found a fabulous scrapbook of carefully tipped-in drawings, on carta bombasina, of mythological scenes. The style and the medium—bistre, Chinese ink and chalks—were so reminiscent of Tiepolo that a less academic mind might have become excited. Summers had seen enough of such works in researching his books to know that drawings in the style of great Venetian artists had been a speciality of many highly talented contemporary fakers. Still, even if these works were to be categorised as “After Tiepolo”, they were still very fine.

What did shock Summers slightly was the subject matter. There must have been twenty or more studies of the Centaur Nessus raping the nymph Dejanira, and a very large number depicting what he could only describe as families of satyrs eating, dancing, making sacrifice to their gods and even making love.

Now this would not be surprising in the library of almost any other architect of that era—all of whom were in some way products of the classical tradition—but Mortensa had been such a devout man, all but saintly in his embodiment of the Christian virtues.

The clue lay in the annotations that accompanied certain drawings, quotations from Pomponius Mela on the subject of satyrs, and extensive references to the Diversorum veterum poetarum in Priapum Lusus, an Aldine edition published in Venice in 1517. All were in the same hand as the previous annotations on demons. Summers recognised here, quite literally, the hand of Borsini.

A single bell began to toll mournfully from the tower of San Bartholomeo. The clouds had parted and the sun was beating on the rooftops of Venice. He would get some fresh air, and perhaps visit Mortensa’s church at last, before a bite of lunch.

Crossing the canal by the nearest bridge, Summers navigated a tangle of calli and cortes to the church. Before entering, he could not resist a look back at the windows of Ca’ Mortensa, thinking how strange it was that he had been inside that beautiful building only minutes before. A shadow passed across the library windows. It was so fleeting that he could not tell its shape. The source must be some passing bird, but it troubled him enough to pause and satisfy himself that there was no recurrence before entering the church.

If Mortensa had been aiming for terribilità with his exterior, the intention inside must have been very different. Summers had never seen a more pious, contemplative church interior in his life. Austere enough indeed to justify the claim once made that Mortensa was the Savanarola of architecture! The green, yellow and black marble created a soothing, submerged atmosphere that suited the rippling greenish light from outside. Summers wandered around in quiet delight, wondering why this architect had never been numbered among the great. Perhaps it was the obvious piety and Christian virtue of the man that was out of step with the tenor of these cynical times. There were no concessions to irreligious sensibilities.

There was a particularly gruesome martyrdom of Saint Bartholomew after Tiepolo (a good deal further “after” than the drawings in the library), and Summers’ eye was also caught by an oblong of murky light that turned out to be a case full of sacred relics. These included some implements of torture, a few leathery rags of skin stretched over ornate frames, and some shrivelled, unidentifiable body parts including a delicately beautiful human head, all mummified by time.

Kneeling there, he tried to see them devoutly as holy objects, but found that he could not banish from his mind the guilty idea of condemned meat in some nightmarish butcher’s window.

There was a danger that this would spoil his lunch. In any case, a cleric in a cassock was approaching, no doubt with some prepared lecture he did not want; he left swiftly.

On his way to the trattoria, Summers thought the cleric had followed him as far as the bridge, but the dazzle of the low sun was playing tricks, for the shivery reflection in the waters below showed a bridge but no figure.

A good meal and a half carafe of red wine later, Summers made his way happily back to the palazzetto. The late Contessa’s devotee was leaving as he let himself in by the landward door, and she tried to engage him in conversation. He could understand little of her quickly-spoken Venetian dialect, and merely nodded politely as he pushed by. Clearly, Bramanti had failed to pass on the message that he was not out to pillage the relics of her devotion. In her distressed state, the oddly pronounced slang was all but impenetrable, but he caught enough words to feel offended. She seemed to be calling him an uninvited intruder, and used words such as monstrous and horrible. The pleasant mood created by his lunch was quite ruined.

In the murky light within, the Venetian mirrors distorted shapes, so that a bronze Antinous or Furietti centaur of red marble glimpsed in their mottled depths seemed to shift and gesture as he passed. In the library he was troubled to find that his books and papers on the desk had been disturbed. At once the idea came to him that the mad acolyte had been snooping, and had acted out her show of welcome merely to throw him off the scent. If so he was at a loss to know what the faintly reddish mess was that dappled the papers and books. Could it be henna, rouge or lipstick? A volume of classical verse lay open, and a smudgy stain lay like a clumsy underlining on the page.

A veiled threat? Or was she mad enough to see anyone who threatened her shrine as a murderer? He would make sure he locked the door from now on.

And so he did. The papers and books were undisturbed next day. Pleased with himself for having thwarted her, he worked well all morning, lunched contentedly and returned to the library rubbing his hands in anticipation. While all of Venice lay under a spell of sleep, he would select some choice volume and browse away an hour or two. Almost he was tempted to take down the folio of mythological drawings, but after a few drinks the subject matter might turn his thoughts in unwonted directions, so instead he chose a treasure of Venetian printing that was hardly conducive to lascivious thoughts: The Feast of the Sensa, being an account of the ceremony of the Doge’s ritual espousal of the Sea on Corpus Christi day.

Summers had heard of this charming ritual enacted yearly, when a wedding ring was cast by the Doge into the waters to ensure the favours of the ocean, so necessary for a sea-faring empire. That indeed was how the account began, but when the Doge set off in the ceremonial splendour of his bucintoro for the open sea, a second Doge similarly clad was described leaving in a covered gondola through the canals to a certain house, named Phytonteo, where he descended by secret ways to a chamber deep below the level of the waters, a dark and noisome place, hung with weapons of torture. There, at an altar raised to other, older gods, he performed a very different rite.

Summers considered his Italian better than adequate, but the strange archaic mixture of Italian, Venetian dialect and Latin in which the book was written confused him. Which of the two Doges was the real one? What did Phytonteo mean? Did the rite culminate in the Doge sacrificing a victim to the waters, or was it the Doge himself who died in monstrous butchery? The tone and subject matter of the book brought to his mind some words of Lawrence on Venice with which Summers had felt no empathy until now

The day was beginning to fade down the long reaches of the library. He should really turn on a lamp, but his surroundings were more than usually beautiful at this time, disclosed and concealed in perfect measure, and even one lamp might spoil a light so richly insufficient. Letting the book slip into his lap, he dozed.

The chiming of the great clock awoke him. He was looking downwards at a shiny expanse of frozen swirls and eruptions of faded colour, fired to life by a strange, tawny light. Faint, reflected images hung inverted just below the smooth surface, but he knew he was not looking at liquid. He was slumped forward in his chair, looking down at the terrazzo floor of the library, now ablaze with the last, low shafts of the setting sun.

There was a sound of movement across the floor in his direction. He remained still, in the posture he had assumed in sleep. If it was the Contessa’s acolyte, she was in for a big surprise.

He could recognise the sound now, bare feet slapping wetly on the cold, marble floor in an uneven, shambling step that seemed too light for one of such rotund form. He became aware of a smell, like stagnant well water; a reflection swam over the undulating surface, into the range of his downcast eyes, and he knew with a horrible certainty that it was not her. The outline he saw was much taller, and much, much thinner, with a head hairless enough to form a bony outline, and gnarly limbs trailing ragged shreds that the figure was attempting to gather around itself with weak, ineffectual movements. It shook and shivered as it moved, and Summers heard a low moan of pain or despair. He was unable to move, or raise his eyes to look fully on what approached him in a wave of ever colder, ever more foul air. As it drew closer, he closed his eyes and clenched himself, still unable to move or breath.

Nothing happened. He risked opening his eyes.

The shape was passing to one side of his seat, towards the nearest book-shelves. By peering out of the corner of his eye, he saw the dimly reflected figure reach towards the books, touch one, and resolve itself into the veins and swirls of colour in the stone. Forcing himself to look up, he confirmed that the figure was gone.

It was just possible that he had confused sleeping and waking, and what he had just seen had not really happened. The test of that theory could hardly be avoided. Crossing to the spot where the reflection had last been, he examined the books before him and found—let him admit it at least to himself, with no real surprise—a familiar dapple of reddish dampness on one of the vellum spines.

Summers drew it out and looked at the title page. It was a volume of Herodotus published by Gregorio de Gregoriis. Returning a little shakily to his seat, he examined it.

There were no annotations or apparent insertions, but the book would not close properly, springing open at a page with no obvious significance. The cause was a piece of paper slipped into a split in the vellum at the head of the spine. It was written in a hand that Summers now recognised, but was a rough draft for a letter, and therefore difficult to decipher. The writer could no longer tolerate the blasphemous and cruel actions in which he had been forced to participate, and unless they ceased, he would have no choice but to denounce the perpetrator, destroying his high renown.

The choice of words was a little convoluted, and the writing scarcely decipherable, so perhaps his translation was faulty. What he had found must be a last attempt by Mortensa to warn Borsini of the consequences of his actions. Yes, that was surely what it must be. In any case, it was high time he got away from this place for a while. With some relief he returned to his lodgings.

That night sleep did not come easily to him. The events of the day replayed themselves in his head. Frightened as he had been by the moment of its appearance, Summers felt that the apparition had done nothing to suggest that it meant him any harm. On the contrary, the whole effort of the poor creature had been to draw his attention to the letter. Was it then Mortensa who had returned? But if so, why had he ever hidden the rough draft, and why was it so important that Summers be shown its hiding place?

The water taxi was late, and he had an urgent letter to post. To make things worse, the water level was rising, lapping the steps of the fondamenta and soaking his feet. It was his sense of urgency rather than whim that led him to hail a gondola, a ridiculous extravagance he would not otherwise have countenanced. Still, he had to admit, as he settled back into the dark leather seat, that his decision had been the right one. For all its image as a tourist cliché, the gondola was undeniably the essential Venetian experience. For a while he lay back and watched the slow, hypnotic parade of elegant bridges, scarred brickwork, crumbling plaster and peeling shutters, his senses lulled by the slap of water on weed-smothered stone and the rhythmic swish of the oar.

The people leaning over the pergoli were all in Renaissance costume, because of course it was Carnival, and everyone had joined in the spirit of Masquerade. Even he had not forgotten, for on looking down he saw buskins, hose and the rim of his cloak. Some people were taking the festivities a little too far, for they had lit fires on the rooftops, and as Bramanti had made so clear, the regulations concerning fire in Venice were strict.

Was it, he wondered, really necessary to travel by such a convoluted route just to post a letter? It had not occurred to him before, but the canals of Venice were nothing more or less than a gigantic aquatic labyrinth with Mystery at its heart. Was it the sunset which turned the sky blazing red, or those fires, which he now saw lined the canal, licking over ruinous buildings, silhouetting figures who teemed around vast engines that turned and swung in the glare. They were clearly devices of torture, hoisting bodies by the neck or stretching them cruelly between chains. And what he had taken for ruined houses were gigantic sarcophagi towering to the sky, mausolea raised by giants, burial chambers of the gods, all lit by the glare of funeral pyres.

Bodies were being broken upon wheels, torn apart, flayed alive. Fortunately, the gondola had become a funeral barge that carried him swiftly, nearer and nearer to the massive bridge, hung with gargantuan chains, that was his destination. Yes, there it was, the keystone carved into the form of a great face swathed in shroud like folds of cloth gathered on top of the head, its mouth the slit into which he must post his message.

Just as he was wondering how to reach the slot, the whole face began to grow, to fill the space under the bridge. Now he wondered how they could navigate the slit of a mouth. When he turned to ask, he saw that the gondolier had been replaced by something whose outline, so black against the glare, he did not wish to see. In any case, the problem was no more, for the stone head on the bridge, which now resembled Sigisomondo Mortensa, had grown snaky hair, and the mouth was gaping wide. Blood rained down from the machinery of death on either side as they swept on, into the gaping maw of darkness.

Summers awoke gasping and running with sweat. Even at that moment he confronted the truth he had not wished to admit to himself, and knew what he must do about it. Why would a successful architect write a letter to his apprentice threatening his high reputation? The answer was that he had not. The apprentice had threatened the Master. And if that was so, then the hand, and the dark utterances, he had taken for Borsini were those of Sigismondo Mortensa.

The implications were inescapable. Vasari had been wrong, or intentionally misleading. The darker annotations had come from the hand of the supposedly saintly paragon. Borsini’s threat of denunciation—the first draft of which he had concealed—had been forestalled by counter denunciation and “disappearance”. Mortensa, it seemed, had not even risked leaving Borsini to the judgement of the Council of Ten, for fear of what might emerge. And now the mills of a very different kind of Venetian justice were grinding on, while lawyers droned like blowflies in courts and offices, and the hand of decay spread a grey benediction of dust over the furniture and statuary of the palazzetto. If an unquiet spirit haunted Ca’ Mortensa—or Ca’ Maledetto as he now agreed it must be—there could be little surprise. Unquiet it would remain until someone at long last exposed the truth.

The next day he returned to Ca’ Mortensa and worked all morning as usual. At noon he ate and drank nothing. Then he waited. He would make himself available for any further communication the apparition wished to reveal about its fate. And he would change the book on which he had been working from the naïve hagiography he had intended to an exposé of the true nature of Mortensa and his heritage.

To pass the time, he read more of what he now knew to be Mortensa’s annotations in the works of architecture:

It had not escaped him that the previous event had occurred at the striking of the Great Clock. As the same hour approached, Summers tried to keep calm, repeating inwardly to himself, I am ready, if there is anything more you wish to show me.

The silence of the library was eventually broken by the striking of the clock, and Summers was afraid. If he was approached again, would he be able to raise his eyes? What would he see? He waited breathlessly, but there were no slapping steps, no stagnant smell, and above all, no swimming, rippling form pouring horribly across the marble floor. He felt a mixture of disappointment and relief. Perhaps the message had been delivered, and the need for visitation ended?

He rose from the chair, turned, and there it was, there at the other end of the library, as though looking at him. It turned stiffly and moved through the shadows with slow, agonised steps. Passing the shelves with no effort to touch them, it walked deliberately up to the trompe l’œil door and disappeared through it. This was so surprising that Summers stood for some seconds before collecting himself and following its path through a channel of foul, bitterly cold air, to the painted door.

He examined the door more closely this time. The rippling canal light played over medallions and swags of muted purple and brown, over the old reddened gold of the door, scalloped and guarded by garland bearing cherubs, for all the world like marble. The panels were studded with metal bosses so real that he had to touch one to be sure they were illusions of paint.

He noticed something else too. The painted keyhole was formed by the mouth of a little gorgon head, and the effect of shadow in the hole was remarkably real, even by the door’s stupendous standards. He put his finger to the place and found a real keyhole.

At once he remembered the two keys on the string Bramanti had left, one of them with a gorgon head decoration. It was still connected to the one in the clock. He retrieved it, and unlocked the panel painted with a fake door that pretended to be real in order to conceal the fact that that was just what it was. The fleeting question of whether a Venetian painter could be correctly described as Machiavellian rose in his mind and was brushed aside.

The pressure it took to open the panel suggested a spring or counterbalance closing mechanism. No light switches met his fumbling hand so he concluded that the room had been unknown when electricity was being installed in the 20th century. His heart pounded with the thought that no one had entered the door for so many years, and of what might be there. Lighting a lamp, he stepped into the space. The door swung closed behind him on a counter balance. Stopping it before it closed fully, he satisfied himself that there was a handle on the inside and that it would open the latch. Only then did he let the door close, tried it once more for peace of mind, and gave his attention to the room.

The first sweep of lamplight revealed a kaleidoscopic rush of strange objects to his sight. He knew at once it was a wunderkammer or cabinet of curiosities, a cramped, oppressive space whose walls were lined with pitted Venetian reflecting glass, at least in those places where it was possible to see the walls at all. Here Mortensa had gathered the dark mysteries of the world into one place. He saw the branches of corals and the tusks of narwhals, festoons of bones, stuffed reptiles. Everywhere stood jars of preserved specimens, some stewed by time into unspeakable broth, others still clear enough to reveal heads with too many mouths or eyes, claws, or humped backs. Magnificent écorché, surely the work of Lodovici Cardi, capturing every sinew and tendon of their skinless torsos in marble. Chalices of bone and many books, some with great metal clasps, and all bound in the same pale hide.

There were foetuses, human and animal, mandrakes and baby dragons, dry withered mermaids and other unrecognisable monsters. Summers was horrified to see sections of human bodies and internal organs, but realised that they were far too highly coloured and solid, too sharply, glitteringly fresh to be anything but perfect wax models. It was a treasure-trove, even for a building such as this. Keep calm, he told himself, remember this moment. For if his lungs and nostrils were sending accurate messages, no one had entered this space for a very long time.

He glanced over the titles of the books. Liceto: De monstrorum causis natura et differentiis. Aldovrandi: Monstrorum historia. Giovanni Rinaldi: Il mostruosissimo mostruo. Despite the tension and fear, Summers had to smile at the last of these titles, at the linguistically monstrous idea of the expression “monster-est of monsters”.

The next book was a once-sumptuous elephant folio of Andreas Vesalius’ De humani corporis fabrica. Clearly that dark rumour about Vesalius’ methods had not put Mortensa off after all; quite the reverse it seemed. On examination it proved to be no ordinary edition of the work. Bound in that troubling, pale soft hide, not quite like pigskin, the pages finest vellum that had resisted the atmosphere of some damp place sufficiently to retain a kind of warped, chlorotic integrity. The printing was blurred in places but was quite decipherable.

The contents were quite unlike any copy of Vesalius that Summers had ever seen. The known work is unforgettable enough, a haunting combination of beauty and horror produced by those images of flayed, dissected bodies strung up on cruel systems of pulleys, twisted into elegant contortions on ropes, or just gracefully walking, muscle and sinew hanging in shreds from delicately poised limbs, a dead parody of graceful sentience. But those plates seemed to have been intended to serve a noble purpose, to unlock the mysteries of human life. This black, occult Vesalius, stamped on its title page with a head of Tiberius, depicted its frayed, skeletal bodies in parodies of The Stations of the Cross, and delineated tortures devised for one purpose only—the infliction of insufferable pain. The text was equally grotesque. One chapter, entitled ‘De Monstris’, was devoted to the creation of monsters, and told how demons assumed the form of their tortured offerings. An architectural sketch in the margin showed a body laying below the foundations of a church accompanied by the words Aufer caput, corpus ne tangito. (Carry away the head, but don’t touch the body.)

The illustrations gradually descended into madness, depicting anatomical specimens slaughtering and butchering each other, skeletal figures locked in cannibalistic embraces, a world in which the tortured and the torturer had become indistinguishable.

Summers put down the book and wiped his hands along his sides. His first instinct was to leave that oppressive, foul-smelling place, but something had caught his eye. A small doorway stood in the wall opposite the entrance. So there was more. The door concealed a cramped stair that coiled down into darkness. Cautiously descending the slimy steps, he came into a chamber constructed of huge stone blocks.

The walls were disfigured with a lacteal canker of mineral damp. Slippery mosses flourished on the floor, forming a spongy, saturated carpet under foot. What he could see of the roof was covered with dripping stalactites and tumorous green humps. At intervals around the walls were gruesome variations of the Karyatid, marble figures of Marsyas suspended by his wrists and flayed, the torn raw condition of the body depicted with repulsive skill by the choice of red and white porphyry.

Between the figures the walls were hung with mirrors, but not the Venetian glasses of the cabinet. These were huge, irregular, dully tarnished as sheets of old corroded steel, but still throwing back contorted reflections of strange tools or weapons that hung from the walls or lay in heaps. In the middle of the chamber stood a Roman altar, once finely carved with Tritons and Nereids, now worn until its figures looked deformed or maimed, its darkly-stained top rounded off and scarred by countless cuts that made it resemble the butcher’s block it undoubtedly had been. Setting down the lamp, he peered around him.

Now he could make out some of the protuberances jutting from the ceiling, corroded metal rings that still held fragments of chains and pulleys.

From the moment he had entered the chamber it had been strangely familiar to him. He knew it from something he had read recently. Then it came back to him. The book of the secret ritual of the Doge.

As he stood wondering over the purpose to which those rusty tools had once been put, a wave of chill, stagnant air swept over him, and a cold hand clamped around his wrist. He cried out and struggled to pull away, but the grip was at once sinewy and slick, five bands of clammy steel around his arm, radiating a chill that flooded through him like an evil injection. A redly-glittering, venous head came thrusting towards him, its thin lips working as they whispered something unintelligible. Reaching the other sinewy claw to the surface of the altar, as though drawing strength from contact with the place of its last pain and ruination, that which had once been Borsini seemed to burgeon for a second into human likeness, so that Summers found himself looking into the face of a young man still full of hope and belief. Something very like a human mouth opened, and a single word issued like sirocco through parched grass.

“Guistizia.”

The hand fell from the altar, and humanity dropped away from the figure as quickly as it had come. Summers last vestige of nerve broke then and, pulling free, he fled. By the light of the lamp—which he was leaving behind at every step—he just about made the foot of the stairs, and buffeted his way up through a narrow, slippery spiral of darkness.

The cabinet was, of course, pitch-black, and he scrambled blindly through that cluttered space, his hands falling upon objects whose yielding or bony contours felt more horrible for being indefinable. A glass jar toppled with a deafening crash, spilling its contents in a wave of unutterably nauseating odour. Slithering through the spilled mess, he overturned a stack of books and fell against a panel with a handle on it, which he turned.

The panel would not open. He threw himself against it, but it would not give. As he struggled a voice close to his ear whispered, “Guistizia!“

In desperation he tried pulling instead of pushing and was released into light and space. The panel slammed behind him as he fled from the palazzetto. He was dimly aware of running beside water, then nothing until, some while later, he stopped and looked around.

It was as if the fate the world had long dreaded had come to pass, and Venice was already fathoms deep in stagnant water. The city was engulfed in a fog that swirled around a crumbling well head and a saturated line of clothes strung across a corte. He had absolutely no idea where he was. His mind was a flood of confused images and realisations. This was the full truth of the saintly Mortensa and the villainous Borsini. He knew now the fate of the young man who had disappeared so abruptly. That dreadful, tragic wreck of a thing had led him, weakly at first, then with growing strength of purpose, to let the world know what had occurred, the real nature of the relics they worshipped, and what lay buried beneath Mortensa’s church. Summers shivered, clutched his thin jacket about him and began to look for a sign that would tell him where the hell he was.

After some minutes of searching he came upon a wall of yellow plaster crumbling away to reveal ancient brickwork, in the centre of which was a great face of stone grimacing out of the fog at him. Carved folds of fabric swathed the head and were gathered at the top like a shroud. Below, familiar words were carved.

He was standing before the Bocche di Leone, its mouth a slot into which accusations had been placed. That he should stumble upon this of all places at that moment could hardly be chance. This was the very mouth into which Mortensa had posted his denunciation, and by so doing saved his own skin by blackening the name of his innocent victim.

With an overwhelming sadness he thought of that wretched spectre walking the dusty shelves of the library through how many years, clutching his own ragged shreds of skin around him like the mantle of some acolyte in agonised devotion to the cruel god who had torn him from himself. Summers found some comfort in the thought that he at least had the power to set the record straight.

Perhaps, he reflected, the Contessa’s companion might not be as mad as she seemed. Had there not been a desperate tone of warning in those weirdly expressed effusions? She had been speaking of something horrible, monstrous, an intruder, but she had not meant him. Something other than eccentricity had driven the women to the cramped confines of one barricaded room. They had seen what he had seen.

Finding the way around Venice was hard enough on a clear day. In the fog it was impossible. He stumbled upon a café and sat for a while, warming his chilled hands around a cup of coffee. The fog began to clear. Armed with detailed directions back to the Via Serpente, he became lost again almost immediately, and may have wandered off his course but for a cleric in a skull cap and cassock glimpsed through the thick veils of mist. When he called out the name of his destination the figure pointed the way. Passing through the narrow calle indicated, Summers came to a halt, facing the mist—wreathed waters of a canal lapping at the green step before his feet. The smell of rotten vegetables was on the air. Evidently, the cleric had directed him into an alley used for loading and unloading barges. Now he would have to retrace his steps.

A bell began to toll very close by, and he recognised it: San Bartholomeo must be directly in front of him. At that moment the mist parted to reveal the pale façade of Mortensa’s creation. So he could be no more than a turning or two from the palazzetto, perhaps almost alongside it, though the view was a little different.

The tolling of the bell was subtly hypnotic, bringing to mind the movement of weed in ocean swell. The mist was dispersing swiftly and the great façade was becoming clearer. In the growing light the shadows on its surface shifted like expressions on a vast, pallid face. What had Mortensa written about the power of shadows? They certainly made the church façade look deep and hollow as a cave, an infinite distance out of which a familiar cassock-clad figure emerged, gesturing rhythmically to the tolling of the bells.

And Summers saw then who—or what—was approaching him with those hypnotic passes of the hands, and realised too late how naïve he had been to think that so formidable a being, capable of raising a temple to the ancient gods under the very noses of the Council of Ten, would allow him to destroy a reputation so cunningly created, and so ruthlessly preserved.

Summers felt compelled to look down and saw on the slimy stone between his feet a symbol or hieroglyph deeply carved. He peered at it, the bell booming through his head, as the symbol filled his vision. It was as if the very stones of Venice were speaking through the cold metal tongue of the bell, telling him to come down and learn what only the stones could know, what they kept hidden from the eyes of man.

He was dully aware that he was toppling into water, was sinking. Despite the bell and the hieroglyph that filled his mind, his desire for life was strong. Gulping in foul water through nose and mouth, he kicked desperately, felt himself sucked down, kicked again and felt his face, a mask of green slime, rise into the air. He took a mouthful, half water, and went down again, his limbs working madly. But something in him could not deny the cruel knowledge of the bell and the symbol. Even as his body struggled, he continued to sink, deeper, it seemed, than a canal could possibly be, down past hieroglyphic-carven walls and shattered columns and vast, impassive faces of stone. The cold arms of the sea embraced him, and still he seemed to sink, married forever, like the Doges of old, to the dark green waters.