Best New Horror 27

by Stephen Jones

  The first aria finished to an enthusiastic ovation. Alondra joined in. The voice had been lovely, as far as she could tell, but not spectacular. Maybe the singer was one of the congregation’s own.

  The accompanist exchanged her flute for some kind of lute. The singer’s voice entered the music with a sustained high note that soared through the church, silvery and radiant. The tone dove back down into the depths, then rose again like a dolphin playing in the waves.

  Around Alondra, people chuckled and swayed, enjoying themselves immensely. She wished she could hear better. Obviously she was missing something remarkable.

  Alondra had grown up listening to vocal music, attending operas with her guardian. Victor taught her to appreciate the nuances of tone and colour in various voices, the ways different singers could flavour a familiar song. She pushed down a stab of grief, one in a long series, for the guardian she’d lost. She swore she would not cry in public.

  The third piece changed mood again. This was some kind of threnody, for a love that was gone and would not—could not?—return. Alondra watched a tear roll off the nose of a weathered fisherman. Black-clad grandmothers dabbed their eyes with lace-edged handkerchiefs. Younger couples clung to each other and sobbed.

  Alondra felt terribly out of place amidst the stricken crowd. What had reduced these people to such a state? As the song built in intensity, so did the crowd’s lamentation. One young woman flung herself to the travertine floor, screaming in distress that eerily paralleled the soprano’s melody. Those around her nodded, unable to offer comfort through their own suffering.

  Perhaps she’d misunderstood and the recital was really a memorial service. Whatever the case, Alondra felt she was intruding.

  She gathered her gloves and crept out of the church.

  The fever worsened as she staggered through the empty streets. Fog muffled every sound but the quiet lapping of water in the canals. The sound reverberated around her, confusing her sense of direction even more. The streetlights cast halos in the fog that hurt her eyes. Inside her shearling coat, her flesh felt clammy, but she was too chilled to open her collar or loosen her scarf. She vowed that if she ever saw another soul, she would beg him to escort her to Palazzo Schicchi.

  But she’d never seen a Venetian night as uninhabited as this. It seemed every god-fearing citizen was tucked safely into bed, shades drawn, lights out.

  Gooseflesh crept up Alondra’s arms. Something walked the night, something ancient and malevolent. She hunched into her black coat and hid in the shadows. Tears prickled her eyes. She’d never felt so alone or so frightened in her life, so incapable of protecting herself.

  She stumbled over a little bridge that arched like a cat’s back, above a narrow canal cutting knife-like between the houses. Beneath her, black water flowed, not a sparkle of reflected light to break its inky surface.

  Alondra leaned over the spiral pillars of the balustrade, willing her eyes to focus. There had to be some reflection. A white streetlight burned at either terminus of the bridge. The fog above her held in enough light that she could see even when streetlights were scarce. She should at least be able to see a shadow of her own reflection.

  Her scarf uncoiled from her throat and dangled one fringed end toward the water. As Alondra reached out to wind it tight again, the scarf slipped from her shoulders and fluttered downward. She lunged after it, nearly losing her balance on the slick stones.

  A pallid hand stretched out from beneath the bridge, fingers cupped around the black water in its palm. The hand was attached to a wrist in a shabby wool coat. Slowly, the corpse bobbed out of the shadows. Alondra recognised the crying fisherman.

  His mouth gawped open. Several of his teeth were blackened and rotting.

  Another body nudged his: the young woman who’d flung herself to the church’s floor. Behind her drifted one of the handsome men Alondra had unconsciously labelled Gondoliers. With eyes closed, he seemed to be still listening to the angelic voice.

  Alondra reeled to the other side of the bridge to gaze down on bodies glutting the narrow canal. They stretched back as far as she could see.

  Slipping, falling, picking herself up, she ran.

  The flight through the city evaporated instantly from her memory. Alondra remembered only the stitch in her side and the terror that stole the laboured breath from her lungs. Finally she lurched through the courtyard of the correct palazzo and flung herself at the bell cord.

  Guilietta Schicchi answered the door herself, a flannel robe thrown over her beribboned nightdress, silver hair loose around her shoulders. Alondra collapsed at her hostess’ slippered feet.

  Guilietta’s knees snapped with a sound like breaking twigs as she knelt at Alondra’s side. In English, she asked, “Oh, my dear one, what’s happened?”

  “They’re dead!” Alondra whispered hoarsely. “They’re all dead.”

  Guilietta touched fingers soft as wrinkled silk to Alondra’s brow. “You burn,” she said sympathetically. She looked up to where her two remaining servants stood on the stair. “Help her to bed, Cesare. Maria, call Dr. Serafin. Then bring us some tea and that torta from dinner. I’ll sit up with her tonight.”

  Alondra woke with a sensation of water inside her head, like swimmer’s ear. Tossing onto her side, she hoped the water would just drain out. With dazed affection, she noted Guilietta sleeping in the armchair beside the bed.

  Instead of draining from her ear, the infection festered. The pain in her head flickered so vividly she could almost see it. Alondra writhed beneath the duvet, disturbing the cats, unable to find comfort.

  In the back of her mind, she heard the melody sung at the fantastical church. She picked at the song, trying to learn its tune, anything to distract herself from the swollen burning ache inside her head.

  Dawn painted streaks of rose outside the window, as bubbles crackled like fireworks behind Alondra’s eardrum. The pain crescendoed, nearly unbearable, before liquid dribbled from her ear. She fainted.

  When she woke again, watery blood streaked her pillowcase. The cats guarding her had changed and Guilietta had gone from the chair. Pain ramped up in her left ear, so Alondra flung herself onto that side and implored her eardrum to rupture already.

  Alondra bolted awake, disoriented and dizzy. As Guilietta spoke, her words seemed to come from a great distance. “This is Dr. Serafin. He will help.”

  The doctor had striking black eyes, fringed with velvet lashes. He set an old-fashioned black bag down on the armchair where Guilietta had spent the night. Alondra whispered, “Buongiòrno.” Her voice sounded loud inside her skull.

  “Buongiòrno,” the doctor replied.

  “I can’t hear you very well, but I can read lips,” Alondra said. “I think my eardrums burst.”

  He rubbed his hands together, warming his fingers before he touched her forehead.

  “The fever has not broken. I will give you something to bring it down.”

  He squatted down to insert an instrument into her right ear. Alondra appreciated that he didn’t make her sit up. Even lying still gave her vertigo.

  He touched her face gently so she would look at him. He spoke slowly, so she could understand. “I see small punctures in your eardrums. They allow the fluid to drain. This used to happen all the time before antibiotics.” He smiled reassuringly. “Allow Guilietta to fuss over you and take the pills I give you. You will be well soon.”

  As the doctor repacked his bag, Alondra asked, “The bodies…?”

  His head snapped toward her. “What did you say?”

  “Last night I saw…perhaps I hallucinated…a canal full of bodies. As if a hundred people drowned.”

  He took her hand. “This is true. This was why I couldn’t come to you sooner. Rio di Santa Caterina was choked with corpses.”

  Alondra shuddered. “How did they die?”

  “Drowning,” the doctor said. “We don’t know why.”

  The doctor touched her face again so she would look up. “Do not wor
ry about this. Sleep, get well, and try to erase this horror from your mind.”

  Guilietta roused her to drink some broth and take her pills. Congestion prevented Alondra from guessing the broth’s flavour. Her hearing had become entirely internal. Every swallow was full of gurgling like the tide going out.

  Drinking the broth exhausted Alondra. She curled up and surrendered to sleep again.

  The Siren’s lament wove through her dreams. The others were gone. The others were at peace now. Why hadn’t she gone with them? Tears welled under her closed lids.

  Alondra wrenched herself awake. Ringing filled her head, different pitches in each ear.

  She tottered to the window, praying that the view would distract her. On the Grand Canal below stretched a parade of gondolas. Each shiny black boat held a long wooden box.

  Seagulls wheeled above the procession. Alondra could not hear their screams.

  The gondoliers must be ferrying the Siren’s victims to San Michele in Isola, the cemetery island where Venice buried all of its dead.

  So many caskets floated by. Alondra didn’t count them. She stood witness, a pallid spirit in a white nightdress at the Gothic window of a 15th-century palazzo.

  She had no tears left for the unknown dead. They were beyond her help now. Even if she had her full strength, she wouldn’t dare go to the graveyard and ask the ghosts what she might do for them. The weight of all that pain, grief, and hunger would blow her out like a candle.

  After vaporettos full of mourners passed, reflections danced on the wavelets, colours muted by the mist curtaining the sun.

  Alondra returned to bed.

  What could she do? Something evil had happened, something she’d accidentally observed. However the singer caused the audience’s despair, whatever magic had been in her song, Alondra had escaped. She wondered if she was the only survivor.

  She tried to envision the congregation leaving the church. They must have come out soon after she fled. Had they taken their leave of each other, kissed one another goodbye? Or had they simply filed to the canal and flung themselves into the gelid water?

  Where was the Christian God to prevent the suicides? Why had he allowed the Siren to sing in his house? Why hadn’t he intervened?

  Alondra shivered under the duvet, tossing so fitfully that the cats sought peace elsewhere. The soprano stalked her dreams. Alondra remembered the shining white garment she wore, like a goddess on a Roman urn. Had she seen Alondra leave the church? Would she come after her, after Guilietta? Alondra was so weak now; it would be better to capitulate than to fight.

  Guilietta brought a tray of tea and toast. Alondra ate dutifully, but the sound her teeth made as they crunched the toast filled her head with ominous rumbling.

  “Do they know why they died?” she asked.

  Guilietta examined Alondra’s face, gauging what she was strong enough to hear. “No,” the old woman said at last. “There were people from every walk of life: shopkeepers, charity wives, fishermen…They had nothing in common.”

  “They were all at a church somewhere in the Cannaregio the night I got sick. It had a balcony with stone drapery. There was a woman who sang to them.”

  “You were there?”

  “This infection”—Alondra waved toward one ear—”I think it saved my life.”

  “Then let us count your blessings,” Guilietta said. “I have heard of these things, these women who sing people to their deaths.”

  “This has happened before?”

  “Oh, yes. Three times that I know. When I was a little girl, at the end of the First World War, the authorities said it was the flu that killed them, but it was not. Years later, they blamed a bomb, then invisible gas…Each time, there were rumours of a woman in a shining white dress with a golden ornament upon her shoulder. La Sirena.”

  “What is she?” Alondra asked.

  “That would have been a question for your guardian,” Guilietta said, gently patting Alondra’s hand. “Victor would have consulted his books and found the answer. We are left with guesswork and rumours. If it’s the same woman, she must be immortal. Or else there are several women, one a generation, trained to lead people to take their own lives.”

  “But why?” Alondra whispered, sinking back to the bed. “There were children in that church, widows…What could anyone have against them?”

  “Perhaps simply that they were Venetian. Perhaps the vendetta is against the city itself.”

  Guilietta smoothed tangled flame-orange hair back from Alondra’s eyes. “You must not worry about this. There are some evils in the world that are too ancient to fight. To them we are candle flames—phfft—too easy to blow out. You must do what you can do; this is what Victor taught you. Save your strength for the battles you must fight, fight with all your mind and all your heart…but you cannot win every battle. In the end, you must not mourn those you cannot save.”

  After the old woman had gone, Alondra considered Guilietta’s final words. Alondra had been mourning Victor, dead now six weeks. She’d done everything in the world that she could think of to save his life, but in the end—in pain, exhausted—he’d crossed the threshold with a smile on his face, anticipating those he loved awaiting him.

  She’d spent all her strength battling Death for him, then she’d spent the last six weeks mourning her failure. Victor was certain he’d gone to a better place. And she, however miserable she made herself, could not throw her life away just to join him. If nothing else, he hadn’t invited her to.

  Alondra rolled onto her left side and stared at what she could see of the sky. The fog swirled and eddied, a vortex that drew her out of herself, out of her sick weak body and into her stubborn, determined centre where she could puzzle over the Siren without distraction.

  Sirens were first mentioned in Homer’s Odyssey. The sorceress Circe warned Odysseus to stop up the ears of his men with beeswax, lest the Sirens seduce the sailors to their deaths. Odysseus directed his men to bind him to the mast so he could listen to the Sirens’ song, knowing that it would suck the joy from his life, that he had “no prospect of coming home and delighting his wife and children”.

  In some tales, after Odysseus and his men escaped them, the Sirens flung themselves into the sea and drowned in a fit of pique. That implied that the Sirens were mortal and could be outwitted. Stopped. Perhaps, as Guilietta suggested, there was not a single woman, but a chain of them revenging themselves slowly on the city that had wronged them.

  Odysseus’ advantage was that he knew the Sirens’ isle lay ahead. He could protect his men. Maybe, Alondra thought sleepily, that was her role in this tale: to be the Circe who warned the next generation of Venetians before the vendetta came due once more. Perhaps she could end it once and for all.

  A generation later, the train no longer ran out to the historic part of Venice. Its causeway lay submerged beneath the surface of the lagoon, a hazard to navigation. The Venetians-in-exile refused to demolish it, to concede that la Serenissima would not be stolen back from the sea. Paolo, whose father—God rest him—had been a gondolier in Alondra’s youth, pointed the tracks out to her as they followed them in his little motorboat.

  The city still rose out of the lagoon like something from a dream. Most of it lay abandoned, inhabited only during the day by tourists. Life in the crumbling buildings had been challenging before, but now, with the lowest floor of every building under a foot or more of saltwater, living quarters were accessible only by partially-submerged staircases. Most residents that stayed slept on yachts moored to their ancient palazzos.

  Water filled the city streets so that there were few places boatmen could not go. Only the highest bridges rose above the waterline, islands in themselves, bridging nothing. Paolo handed over his handkerchief with a complicated smile. Alondra wiped tears from her cheeks.

  She had an appointment with Casio, a mad musical genius who recorded the creaks and gasps of Venice in its death throes. She’d heard his music via the Internet, told him what she needed,
and he promised to be ready. Based on the timing of the previous attacks, Alondra figured they had three days.

  She recalled her last visit with Guilietta, more than two decades ago, so soon after Victor’s death. Stumbling upon the Siren’s concert had changed Alondra’s life. She thought back over the adventures she’d had, the wonders she’d seen, the creatures she had come to fight because of the monster in the Cannaregio. The Siren had inadvertently given Alondra’s life purpose: to protect as many people as she could from creatures against whom they could not defend themselves. She had inspired Alondra to become a champion.

  While Paolo spread word of the recital to the remaining denizens of the city, Alondra and Casio rappelled from the inside of St. Mark’s, mounting public address speakers to the bases of the domes. They built a small stage from scavenged lumber in front of the chancel. Casio had Alondra stand upon it, singing pop songs and anything else that came into her head as he learned the acoustics of the cathedral.

  Alondra careened between worry that her calculations had been wrong and the Siren would not come, and dread that she had been right and was luring all who remained in Venice to their deaths.

  As late afternoon fog swallowed Venice, Alondra assumed her place in the rickety gallery above the flooded sanctuary. Casio played one of his compositions while Venetians arrived in little motorboats, rowboats, kayaks, and a pair of scuffed gondolas. Each boat brought a pitch-soaked torch to light the cathedral, sparking the 13th-century mosaics to life.

  If La Sirena harboured any suspicions about having been led to St. Mark’s Basilica, they didn’t ruffle her serene exterior as she ascended the makeshift stage. Alondra marvelled again at the shining white garment that accented the creature’s curves, giving grandeur and mystery to her body. She did indeed look like a goddess of antiquity.

  The accompanist was a hunched crone now. Still, she somehow summoned enough wind to play her flute. The recital soared, even lovelier than Alondra remembered. With clearer hearing, she appreciated the crystalline purity of the Siren’s high notes, the controlled depth of her lows. The voice spanned four octaves effortlessly, no seams between the registers.