The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror 2002, Volume 13

by Stephen Jones

  ‘Just curious,’ said Jo dismissively.

  But when moonlight lay white on the campo that night, and sleep eluded her, she got up, padded to the window and looked out to see whether any pallid thing was waving to her. The corner house was deep in shadow, and somehow that was more unsettling than seeing something. Even when she finally drifted off to sleep, her dreams were populated with floating masks and pale shrouds on the shores of stagnant waters.

  Mist, which really came on cat feet, transformed the city the next morning into a place of ghosts and shadows indeed, and smelling strongly of the sea. Jo skulked in bed, fatigued from her broken night, grumpy with lack of sleep; and then the phone rang.

  ‘Pronto,’ she yawned into the mouthpiece. For a long time there was nothing but the rush and clatter of the phone line, and then, as she was about to hang up, very faint and faraway, a voice said, ‘Are you coming?’

  ‘What?’

  Another long pause, and then, ‘If you don’t come to me, I’ll come to you.’

  The line went dead, and left Jo staring at the receiver and thinking about M. R. James.

  And then she jerked awake with the compulsive indrawn whoop of holding her breath too long, and stared round the suddenly unfamiliar room without comprehension for nearly a minute.

  She got out of bed, the old linoleum cold beneath her feet, and walked through to the main room, where she trod on something sharp that made her hop and curse. Investigating, she found it was a necklace: a rather pretty antique thing of opals and jade with a vaguely oriental look. Jo picked it up and put it on the table by the telephone, catching sight of her sleep-rumpled face in the mirror above. Not a jewellery person at the best of times – her idea of dressing up was a clean pair of jeans – she was hardly tempted to slip the necklace over her head to see how it would look. Even the fact that she could entertain such a thought made her smile, and she crossed to the window.

  Opening the shutter nearly dislodged the white cat, which yowled angrily and took its leave in the feline equivalent of a huff. Outside, the weather truly was misty, so much so that the corner house was invisible and the sounds of people bestirring themselves were muffled, as if they had all put on boots of felt and decided, inexplicably, to speak in whispers. But then she heard the sharp bark of a dog, cutting through the dull cloud.

  Not without suspicious glances at the telephone, Jo picked through the cards in the big dish beside it, until she found the one she was looking for.

  ‘La Casa della Scala,’ said Maurizio Giordano, whom Jo had been told knew everything there was to know about Venice. ‘The House with the Stair.’ Expecting, for no logical reason, a kindly gnome of a professor, she had been surprised to find a lumbering great young man who, had he been a dog, would have been a St Bernard, possibly crossed with an Irish wolfhound. He was the proprietor of an establishment called The Arcane Library – though even a brief glimpse at the shelves made Jo think ‘eclectic’ would be a better word.

  ‘The House with the Stair?’ she repeated, giving the words the same capitalization.

  ‘That’s right, it’s quite famous. All the guides take the tourists to look at it. If you go through the archway on the right of the house you’ll find a spiral staircase leading up the back, with a thing like a dovecote on top. It was built by a guy called Umberto Scimone, who most people think was as mad as a hatter. Because, you see, the staircase doesn’t connect to the house at all, unless you want to jump two metres across and up or a metre down to get in through a window.’

  ‘So what’s the story?’

  ‘Well, he built the staircase for cats, apparently. He was potty about cats. You know M. C. Escher?’ Giordano asked, with apparent irrelevance.

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Have you seen that print of all the curly-up critters going up and down one of his stair-mazes?’ Jo nodded. ‘That was the sort of thing Scimone had in mind. He even did a sketch of hundreds of cats doing much the same thing, up and down an endless stair. Though I don’t think he was quite so fascinated by impossible geometry as Escher, being an architect, you see.’

  Behind the professor, the open window gave onto a properly functional balcony on which stood a wicker chair, a small table, and a bay tree with a spiral trunk in a Chinese pot. From not too far away came the sounds of vaporetti plying the canals, but their clamour was currently being contested by some enthusiastic Verdi from somewhere nearby. Early, she thought; Ernani, perhaps. The air felt damp, although the mist was mostly gone, risen into the sky to dull the late-autumn sun and mock the eyes with air.

  ‘And who was Signor Della Quercia?’

  ‘As a matter of fact, he was my grandfather. On the wrong side of the blanket, though, as they say. But we’re not yet done with Signor Scimone. Would you like a glass of wine?’ Jo assented, and was shortly presented with a nicely chilled Vernaccia. That done, the professor continued, ‘I assume you know what ley lines are?’

  ‘Sort of,’ she replied. ‘Lines of . . . force, aren’t they? The Old Straight Tracks,’ she added, the title popping up unbidden, although she had never actually read the book.

  ‘Positive force, to be exact,’ said Giordano, and waited for Jo to nod her head. Sipping his wine, he continued, ‘So it won’t have occurred to you that they might have a negative equivalent?’

  ‘Not really,’ Jo said. ‘I hadn’t given it much thought.’

  ‘Well, Signor Scimone did. And he came to the conclusion that Venice was riddled with the things. Lines of bad luck, if you like. Interestingly enough, it seems La Fenice was built on one.’ Jo, who still grieved at the loss of the opera house, nodded. ‘Scimone had quite a lot of . . . shall we say, individual ideas. Apart from the negative ley lines, he used all sorts of arcane formulae to influence his work.’

  ‘What, sort of eighteenth-century Italian feng shui?’

  Giordano laughed, a curiously high sound from such a huge frame. ‘You could say that.’ He got to his feet and hunted amongst his bookshelves, leaving Jo staring at a collection of what appeared to be grimoires. Finally he extracted a slim volume, the cover of which he showed to Jo: it featured the cat drawing he had mentioned earlier. It was called Le Gatti e L’Architettura; she missed the author’s name.

  Opening it delicately, he flicked through pages until he found what he was looking for. ‘Here it is: “Scimone’s fascination with cats is well known, but perhaps the full extent of it is less common knowledge. In a letter to Fiorenza Tevere, he proposed the somewhat Brunoesque view that he saw them as merely the earthly manifestations of huge and benign beings which had their existence in another sphere entirely. As such, he believed their benevolence was a positive force for good, and planned every building to take advantage of this, especially those which had to be constructed on or near negative ley-lines.”’

  ‘A cat-flap in every palazzo?’ suggested Jo, not without sarcasm.

  ‘Actually it was Galileo who invented the cat flap,’ said Giordano, straight-faced, and Jo didn’t know whether to believe him or not.

  Closing the book, he refilled their glasses, and looked at her expectantly.

  ‘And I suppose the house is on one of these negative ley lines?’ she said.

  ‘Exactly. Now listen, the plot thickens. Scimone built the house, properly the Palazzo Della Quercia, for one of my ancestors, carefully explaining to him the significance of the stairs, which were, in essence, a very grand cat flap, allowing them to come and go via an upper floor.’

  ‘But didn’t you say—’

  ‘Yes, indeed. But originally the stairway was attached to the palazzo, by a sort of mini-Bridge of Sighs. Which, at some time in the late nineteenth or early twentieth century, simply disappeared. No one knows how. Or when. Or why. But I think I can hazard a guess at the why.’ He paused.

  ‘To exclude the cats?’ hazarded Jo, feeling a little like the straight man in a vaudeville act.

  ‘Yes, yes. But if we accept Scimone’s use of cats as a kind of guardian against malign fo
rces, removing the bridge very effectively cut off their protection.’

  ‘But why would anyone want to do that?’

  ‘Someone who wanted to contact the malign forces might. The Della Quercia family have enjoyed a . . . mixed reputation over the years. At one stage they were supposed to have owned some kind of powerful amulet brought back by Marco Polo, but nobody knows what became of that.’

  Jo took a mouthful of wine and savoured the slightly metallic taste. ‘Are we talking of a Della Quercia warlock?’

  ‘Not a warlock,’ the professor corrected her. ‘A necromancer.’

  There was a sudden silence, vaporetti and Verdi alike both mute for a long instant as a chill travelled down Jo’s back.

  ‘Someone who talks to the dead . . .’

  ‘Oh, more than talked, I think. And not to the dead, exactly,’ said Giordano softly, and suddenly he didn’t seem a kindly figure at all.

  Walking back from this meeting, Jo again felt surrounded by phantoms, but this time they had been conjured by speech and conjecture rather than atmosphere and legend ancient and modern. Things seemed to want to unravel, as if the knowledge of Scimone’s negative ley lines had opened a third eye that was capable of seeing or at least sensing them all around her, an almost palpable cat’s cradle in the air.

  Her footsteps rang and echoed in the deserted campo, in the hollow of her head. She found herself, once more, standing outside the house with the stair, but instead of looking up at the windows (and whatever might be waving out of them) she followed Giordano’s remembered instructions and headed through the archway he had described, unsurprised to disturb the white cat, which had been basking in an errant patch of sunlight. It shot her a very human look of annoyance at having its rest interrupted.

  The tower struck her as a beautiful thing; somehow, in her speculations and imaginings, she had not been prepared for beauty. There was something so patently perfect about it that it took her breath away. Yet its absolute perfection was marred. Lacking its bridge, it was incomplete, like an unfinished song. Jo sighed, looking up at the blank brick back of the palazzo, all shutters fastened, all secrets hidden away.

  But she could climb the tower, she thought. Perhaps from the top she would see something enlightening. Almost automatically she walked towards it, and set her foot on the first marble step. Dizziness enclosed her briefly, and a phrase of Giordano’s came to her.

  Impossible geometry.

  Jo shook her head to clear it, and began to ascend. An almost overwhelming sensation of déjà vu possessed her, instantly recognizable, unlike most such. Many years earlier, before the authorities closed it to the public, she had climbed the bell tower at Pisa, had lurched like a spacewalker up steps that threw her balance from one side to another: up had not been consistently up, was sometimes almost down; just so would a climber of one of Escher’s edifices experience their endless turning, twisting stairs.

  She tried to concentrate on the steps. They were not worn by the soft insubstantial tread of cats, with their feet as light as mist; nor was the marble furred with dust, for it shone whiter than the airy translucence of the Taj Mahal that looks, from a distance, like lace painted on the dawn. There was no handrail, so she trailed her left hand around the central column as she climbed – widdershins, of course.

  With a suddenness that was startling, she reached the top, a circular chamber on whose floor the sunlight lay bright and striped by the shadows of the columns that surrounded it. Breathing a little heavily, she put her hands on her protesting thighs and bent slightly to recover.

  It was strangely peaceful at the top of the cat tower. Across from Jo the blind façade of the palazzo loomed, uncompromising, shutters still covering its windows, one – she did a double-take and looked back at an area her gaze had already passed over – slightly ajar. She walked to the edge and looked out over the void, drawn by the darkness behind the shutter. What wealth of secrets was hidden within? And what guardian might be set over them?

  Vertigo tugged at her and she steadied herself on a marble column, gravity – and the human fear of it – reasserting itself as the sudden squeal of an angry cat captured her attention. Feeling a trifle embarrassed (she was, after all, trespassing), Jo descended the stair and crept back out into the quiet campo and home again.

  Why did she still feel such a compulsion to get into Della Quercia’s house?

  If you don’t come to me, I’ll come to you.

  Jo paced the room, nervily. Night had stolen up on her – night, and too much caffeine. She knew she wouldn’t sleep in this state, and that irritated her further.

  ‘Damn and blast it,’ she muttered, finding herself at the open window again, and staring out across the campo at the Casa della Scala.

  All at once, she was convinced that there was someone standing behind her. No noise disturbed the silent apartment, no breath shared her air, but someone was in the room with her, and her back went icy cold. For no apparent reason, she thought of rats – rats in the walls.

  She gripped the windowsill in unreasoning terror, and her blood thundered in her ears. Unwillingly, her gaze moved sideways, to look at the room’s slanted reflection in the open window.

  Nothing, nothing, nothing, went her thoughts like a mantra. The lamp on the table, the one with the shade of Murano glass, shed a pool of soft light; everything else was in shadow. She could see no one reflected in the flat shiny glass. Yet she could not, physically could not, turn round, for fear of what stood in the room with her, watching.

  Smiling. Now why do I think that? Jo shut her eyes, squeezed them tight, and the sense of being no longer alone vanished abruptly. Drawing a few deep breaths, she turned to face the room before opening her eyes again, and then scurried for the light switch to turn on all the illumination she could.

  As she came back to the table, strewn with her papers and notes, she saw a key lying beside her pen.

  Her scalp prickled. She eyed the key suspiciously. It was a large key for a deadlock, much like the one that opened the main door downstairs. There was no doubt in her mind what door this one would open.

  So she stretched out her hand to pick it up, only to jump back, startled into alarm by the sudden squalling shriek of an angry cat. Her heart tried to high-jump out of her chest, and she let out her breath in a sharp curse.

  Up to her windowsill, ghost-pale like a spectre, leapt the white cat, its ears back, hissing defiance at something outside. Jo threw a ball of paper at it, which the cat ignored, and jumped down into the room, miaowing loudly at her. She tried to take evasive action, but it bumped her legs, twined itself round, its voice raucous in the silence.

  ‘What do you want, Signor Gatto?’ she asked, catching its tail, which it carried aloft like a banner. It continued to weave around her legs, and Jo sighed. ‘I haven’t got any food,’ she told it. ‘Unless you like uncooked pasta.’

  The cat head-butted her in the shin. She sat down to stroke it, despite not considering herself a cat person, and it surprised her by jumping onto her lap and sitting there with none of the usual kneading.

  ‘Oh, all right, if you insist,’ she said, and picked up the newspaper.

  Morning light flooded in, chill and white, without a hint of fog. It brought with it an air so icy that it might have come straight from the peaks of the Dolomites. Jo woke cold and cramped, but with a warm place in her lap that evoked a very recently departed cat. Surprised, she stretched herself, got up carefully in case of cricked necks or other joints, and closed the window – not without a faintly suspicious glance out onto the campo. Which was deserted: she looked at her watch and found the hour ungodly.

  Some time later, washed, brushed and flossed, she headed towards Roberto’s with an extra key in her jeans pocket. She had also, for some reason, picked up the antique necklace.

  There was still a marked chill in the air, heralding that summer’s tenacious rearguard might finally be admitting defeat. The bright sky was already clouded over, grey above the wind. Jo tucke
d her hands deep in the pockets of her duffel-coat, and walked faster.

  In the steamy espresso-scented warmth, La Strega’s daughter said to her, ‘I hear that house has been sold at last, the one you were asking about,’ and put a small cup on the table. Jo drank her coffee thoughtfully, and forgot to leave a tip.

  At the front door, Jo paused to check whether she was observed; seeing no one, she quickly inserted the key and turned it before she could change her mind. The door swung inward, its hinges creaking only very faintly, and she stepped inside as soon as the gap was wide enough. Behind her, it shut quietly, leaving her in a shadow-hung hall that smelled of mildew and the sea, musty and salty, damp and sharp. And under that, another, ranker odour, like something left to rot: a drainy, sewery stench.

  Her feet crunched on the floor as she took a tentative step, and she looked down to see fallen plaster shards. They had flaked off the walls, leaving them with the look of diseased flesh. Further down the passage lay decorators’ detritus: a pair of scabrous buckets, a grubby dust sheet piled in a heap, a paint-stained stepladder. As she started up the wide staircase she heard rain start to rattle outside. Vague ideas of accessing the cat tower flitted through her thoughts, but the pull of the open window was too strong.

  Part of her mind noted in passing that the upward leprousness of the walls ceased halfway up the first flight of stairs, and presumed that the house had fallen victim, during its disuse, to the curse of acqua alta – no respecter of persons or places, palazzi included. What she was noticing much more insistently, however, as she ascended further, was the smell. Now the sweetish stink of decay had gained the upper hand, making her try to breathe shallowly. But her heart was pounding with anticipation and her lungs wanted extra oxygen, not less; so she resorted to pulling a hanky from her pocket and hiding her nose in that. It had, unfortunately, very little effect.

  Something’s dead up here. The conclusion was inescapable. Jo started to sweat, felt it crawling through her hair. Suddenly she didn’t want to enter the room, but her volition carried her to the door and put her fingers round the handle; even as she turned it, pushing the door open, her mind was telling her not to go in.